Yeah Yeah Yeahs Cool It Down Review: All Grown-Up and Everywhere to Go

Yeah Yeah Yeahs arrived on the New York alt-rock scene with such scorching intensity, accompanied by such immediate and unsustainable hype, that they seemed like the kind of group that would burn out fast. Incredibly, they managed to evade such a fate. Even on their 2003 debut, Fever to Tell, they had already begun displaying a willingness to evolve beyond the art-punk rave-ups with which they first made their name. Their creative restlessness culminated in 2009’s dance-pop-inflected It’s Blitz!, which was, in retrospect, ahead of its time.

The fact that the only, albeit brief, tour that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have embarked on in the last nine years was in support of the 2017 reissue of Fever to Tell suggested that the band was starting to embrace nostalgia rather than continuing to try to outrun it. Fortunately, their fifth studio album, Cool It Down, just about puts that fear to rest. It’s a formidable statement of purpose, one that sounds unmistakably contemporary without ever veering into flavor-of-the-month pandering. In fact, the band sounds more comfortable in themselves than ever.

Karen O and company don’t shy away from acknowledging how much both the world and they themselves have changed over the last decade. The album’s title, nicked from a Velvet Underground song, not so subtly references our overheated political and geographical climate, which clearly informs many of the album’s lyrics. So do the personal changes that the band has gone through during their hiatus; most notably, Karen O became a parent, which she directly addresses in “Mars,” the twinkling, wide-eyed spoken-word track that closes Cool It Down.

Perhaps it’s down to Karen O’s motherhood that she sings from a perspective beyond her own. Opener “Spitting Off the Edge of the World” at first sounds almost like Yeah Yeah Yeahs’s version of doom metal, unfurling at an agonizingly slow crawl with a crushing, dissonant synth drone. But then Karen O offers a harsh whisper of “And the kids cry out…” before launching into an fist-raising chorus. “Never had no chance/Nowhere to hide,” she sings, ostensibly lamenting the seemingly insurmountable nature of the various crises the modern world faces, but doing so with Gen-Z-inspired defiance and even hopefulness rather than Gen-X doomerism.

There’s a similar dichotomy present on the track “Wolf”: “I’m hungry…I’m lost and lonely,” Karen O sneers over a dark, strutting beat. The song is about trying to hold onto salvation from a brutish world that she’s already found, rather than reveling in that brutality: “Don’t leave me now/Don’t break this spell/In heaven lost my taste for hell.”

Clearly, Karen O remains a master of brevity, and that’s even more evident on “Different Today,” a softer, more wistful take on these uncertain times. The lyrics are simple—“I feel different today, I do/Oh, how the world keeps spinning/It goes spinning out of control”—but they cut to the essence of how it feels to live in an ever-changing world, regardless of one’s age.

Cool It Down’s music has similar cross-generational appeal. The references to past eras, as on the discofied “Burning,” only underscore the through lines from those eras to modern pop. And while there are some strident moments that seem designed for the dance floor (such as the deafening synth riff that serves as the climax of “Wolf”), the electronic-focused arrangements are largely spare and gritty, offering a modern twist on the band’s garage-punk roots.

“Fleez,” in particular, is a perfect marriage of the band’s embrace of pop-leaning danceability and guitarist Nick Zinner’s more traditionalist impulses. One minute Karen O is cooing a silky, Blondie-esque hook, the next she’s putting on her old sneer and shouting “Yeah yeah yeah yeah!” over Zinner’s stabbing guitar. In this moment, like many others on Cool It Down, they sound at once like the same band they always were, and an entirely new one.