The Ecstasy of Karen O

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer will give in to her urges, so long as she's onstage.

- E. Alex Jung

Listen for the yowl that splinters like a live wire and you’ll hear Karen O attempting an exorcism. Her shows with her band, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, in the early 2000s were crotch-grabbing, microphone-fellating, olive-oil-drizzling art-punk chaos, performed in outfits by the artist Christian Joy that looked like the next morning’s hangover. If you felt she was working something out, she was. “I was going through some shit,” she says. “Times, like, a hundred.” ¶ After a nine-year hiatus, Karen O and her bandmates, Nick Zinner and Brian Chase, return with Cool It Down, spurred by another sense of crisis. Their first LP, Fever to Tell from 2003, channeled the wreckage of post-9/11 New York; their latest contains the threat of environmental apocalypse. When Karen O began playing with the band, youth was her armor. But the woman who sat down in a restaurant booth for this conversation projected the other side of the too-sensitive artist, one who describes herself as “a cautious, the-world’s-a-scary-place kind of person.”

Your new singles, “Spitting Off the Edge of the World” and “Burning,” channel an existential dread that I associate with  L.A.—that the world might fall apart at any moment.

You know