"Cool It Down": Yeah Yeah Yeahs' first album in nine years feels the heat

    They might have emerged from the hipster crucible of millennial New York, their reputation assured by their badge on the lapel of a member of The Strokes when such a thing was the rock’n’roll equivalent of a diplomatic passport, but the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have never quite fitted the standard concept of cool. Aloof nonchalance wasn’t their thing; instead, they tended towards the excitable, even the exuberant, frontwoman Karen O exploding across the stage like an exothermic reaction between beer and spit. Their hectic, wild-eyed 2003 debut was called Fever To Tell; even their dreamiest love songs tended towards the full-body swoon. They don’t love you like I love you. You suddenly complete me.

    Cool It Down is the trio’s first album since 2013’s swampy Mosquito, but it’s immediately clear that O, Nick Zinner and Brian Chase have lost none of their taste for drama. The Dave Sitek-produced Spitting Off The Edge Of The World, featuring the equally expressive Perfume Genius, could have been recorded on the lip of a vast crater, a Gen Z pop hit thrown into a volcano as a sacrifice — appropriate, considering its defiant lyrics about facing down the climate crisis. 

    Burning (“like a meteor I glow ”) has its urgency fanned by a Four Seasons-inspired piano loop. Wolf, meanwhile, combines lupine imagery with a euphoric Faithless-throwrback techno hook that resembles the opening of a European football tournament. Fever pitch all the way.

    Similarly, there’s no attempt to be casual about influences. The album’s title is lifted from The Velvet Underground’s Loaded. On Fleez, O not only sings about dancing to ESG, she lifts the hook to the South Bronx sisters’ song Moody; while the excellent Blacktop, Julia Holter on a Bruce Springsteen road trip, lifts a line or two from Dylan Thomas. Aware of a world on fire, it’s unafraid to seize the day, to show’ exactly what it loves.

    Cool It Down occasionally melts down. The spoken-word Mars, for example, with its input from a wise child and ominous hint of Earth’s obsolescence, doesn’t quite land with the weight it needs, while Different Today’s global angst is mainly saved by its irresistible disco uplift. Yet even though it’s only eight tracks long — a rare example of the band having some chill — their fifth album feels like it’s operating on a cosmic scale. “Stars don’t fail me now” O sings on the deep-breathing synth mantras of Lovebomb, as if she’s standing in for all tiny humans dancing in the shadow of a precarious future. Beneath all the heat and light, Cool It Down is at the heart of the action, a dramatic band going head-to-head with dramatic times. Their fever hasn’t broken yet.