The 10 Best Yeah Yeah Yeahs Songs
Photo by Dan MartensenIt’s been a fun ride to be a Yeah Yeah Yeahs fan over the years. Although the trio of Karen O, Nick Zinner and Brian Chase have formed an identity that’s hard to mistake for anything else, the band has tweaked and scrambled its own three-pillar foundation by experimenting with different instruments, song structure and arrangements. The result is four decidedly different full-lengths and a handful of EPs to satisfy fans between albums.
Here are our 10 favorite Yeah Yeah Yeahs tracks, including the infectious single from the band’s latest album Mosquito, released today.
10. “Art Star”
The Yeah Yeah Yeah’s self-titled EP might have set the stage for what they’d become on their debut, Fever to Tell, but “Art Star” was the outlying track that proved a lurking, yet-to-be-seen quirkiness—and how they willing the trio was to hop to polarized ends of the musical spectrum. The track’s childishly bouncy intro is fun enough to draw an audience, only to send many covering their ears with Karen O’s tastefully painful chorus howls. It’s a band grabbing pop sensibility and twisting its arm until it sings the song they want to hear.
9. “Y Control”
What better way to wind down the band’s thunderous debut LP than with a track that manages to put their identity under a microscope? We get Zinner looping and winding his guitar parts under Karen O’s now-lulled meditations on control, the band toeing a line between garage ferociousness and honest introspection. It’s moody but accessible, familiar but unpredictable—A road map for how the band’s catalog will unfurl for years to come.
8. “Cheated Hearts”
Near Show Your Bones’ mid-point, we’re treated to a fairly straightforward, jangly guitar-led jaunt informed by The Smiths and R.E.M. But Karen O takes the blank canvas and splatters her personality all over the thing by perfectly cracking at all the right moments or dragging out and slurring all the oddest vowels. But Zinner’s simplicity at the beginning is no mistake; He makes his big entrance near the 1:30 mark, ripping into some over-stacked chords that make you rethink what’s possible from a bass-less three-piece.