A conversation with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs from 2003

That time I missed out on the blackout of the century because I was interviewing Karen O. and co. in France

Aug 15, 2025

Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s to present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars (and the occasional classic-rock icon). This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).

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THE OPENERS

Ecoutez, mes amis! This past weekend, I appeared on CBC Radio’s Polaris Music Prize preview series The Ten with host Odario Williams and La Presse’s Dominic Tardif to make a case for Montreal prog-punk power trio Population II’s très fantastique Maintenant Jamais. Listen here (and then check out my Pitchfork review of the album here).
This week at Commotion, I had Max Read come on the show to discuss Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, the Worst Song Ever discourse, and why Canada is partly to blame for stomp-clap-hey:
Notes on this week’s additions to the stübermania 2025 jukebox:
Click here for the Apple Music version
- The Hidden Cameras, “Quantify”: Joel Gibb is set to drop the first Hidden Cameras album in nine (!) years, BRONTO, on Sept. 12, and one nice thing about taking so long between records is you can essentially wipe the slate clean and completely rewrite your narrative. In his case, it means retiring the “gay folk church music” slogan once and for all: With this foray into strobe-lit electro-house, Gibb essentially imagines an alternate post-2002 trajectory where the Cameras signed to DFA instead of Rough Trade.
- Boy Commandos, “It Doesn’t Take a Lot”: Fucked Up’s once-silent musical mastermind Mike Haliechuk has been gradually getting more comfortable borrowing the mic from Damian Abraham in recent years, and with “Comet”—his debut solo effort as Boy Commandos (out Sept. 5)—he gives us the late-period Hüsker Dü album we always knew he had in him. (Note: this song is only available on the Apple Music version of the playlist linked above; the rest of you should check it out on Bandcamp.)
- Dijon, “Another Baby!”: As I wrote in my Apple Music notes for his brand-new Baby, the current spiritual advisor to pop’s most famous Justins is “part Prince, part Salvador Dali, rendering his sensuous serenades in pitch-shifting surrealist style, like tapes from a late-night Paisley Park session left out to melt in the morning sun.”
- OSees, “Sneaker”: The recently released ABOMINATION REVEALED AT LAST is the 29th album from Jon Dwyer’s perpetually rebranding crew, and admittedly I stopped keeping tabs on them around album no. 22 (when the garage/psych-to-prog/metal ratio started tipping heavily in the latter direction). But this highlight manages to update the band’s peak-period motorik-punk blitzes with the current formation’s double-drummer dexterity.
- Marissa Nadler, “Sad Satellite”: Over the past two decades, Nadler has amassed a deep discography of heavenly and haunted Americana that’s easy to take for granted, because she’s so unerringly consistent in setting that desert-goth vibe. But the mesmerizing closing track on New Radiations (out today) shows how she can still absolutely wallop you with just her gentle finger-picking, spell-casting voice, and subtly swelling background textures.
- This is Lorelei & MJ Lenderman, “Dancing in the Club”: About 10 years ago, I leased a car that came with Sirius satellite-radio capabilities and took advantage of a cheap subscription offer, but when my lease was up after five years, I traded it in for a car that wasn’t equipped with the Sirius hardware. When I called to cancel my subscription, they offered to keep me on with the Sirius phone app for, like, two dollars per month, and seeing as I can Bluetooth it through my car stereo, it’s essentially like having a proper system. But in between having to listen to specific records for work purposes and being forced to play the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack on a continuous loop whenever my daughter’s in the car, I often go months without using the app. All of which is to say: This past week, I started tuning into Sirius XMU again for the first time in a minute, and they’re currently playing this track about as often as SiriusXM Hits is playing that Benson Boone song that rips off “Physical” more flagrantly than Doja Cat’s “Kiss Me More.” I missed this MJ makeover of “Dancing in the Club” when it first came out in the spring as part of the deluxe edition for This Is Lorelei’s Box for Buddy, Box for Star, but my belated discovery of it couldn’t have come at a better time: In MJ’s calloused hands, a tune that once sounded like a Postal Service tribute becomes the best Neil Young song released this decade, making me extra-psyched to see the real-deal Neil at Budweiser Stage next week.

THE HEADLINER:
A conversation with Karen O, Nick Zinner, and Brian Chase of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs

The date: August 16, 2003

Publication: Eye Weekly

Location: A press tent backstage at the Route du Rock Festival in Saint Malo, France

Album being promoted: Fever to Tell

The context: Twenty two years ago this weekend, much of the North American eastern seaboard was plunged into darkness by a massive blackout that—in Toronto at least—lasted for the better part of two days. But while such a prolonged outage could potentially thrust a city into chaos, the blackout actually proved to be a magical moment where everyone was forced to hit the pause button—kinda like a COVID lockdown, minus the looming threat of infectious disease. Neighbours who had previously only nodded and waved at each other actually had proper conversations for the first time, friendships for life were forged, and everyone was reminded of the power and beauty of community connection.

Or so I heard. I have no blackout bonding moments to share, because, at the time, I was 6,000 kilometers away from home in Saint Malo, France at the Route du Rock Festival, where, in a pre-smartphone era, I learned of the outage while hanging out on the beach and engaging in small talk with a local who spoke little English, but, upon learning I was from Toronto, simply said “blackout!” I was in France tagging along with Broken Social Scene on their first European jaunt, which included a date at the festival, and seeing as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were set to play their first Toronto show at the Opera House later that month, I opted to make it a working vacation and do an on-site interview with the band for an Eye Weekly cover story.

While the whole group was present, Brian didn’t really say anything, so this is essentially a conversation with Nick and Karen. I couldn’t locate the original interview tape, so what follows is the actual article that ran in the August 28, 2003 edition of Eye Weekly—plus, through the magic of YouTube, a pro-shot video of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ entire Route du Rock set. The scene described in the opening paragraphs of the piece can be viewed starting at the 1:02:15 mark:

SAINT MALO, FRANCE—Back home in Brooklyn, the mean streets are dancing in the dark, but on this hot August night on the north coast of France, all lumières shine on Karen O. Even if someone pulled the plug on the French electrical grid, it’d still be easy to spot the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ frontwoman in the blackest of nights. Ping-ponging across the stage at France’s Route du Rock festival, Karen is no longer just a singer, but rather a dizzying flash of blue face paint, faux leopard-skin hot pants, ripped pink stockings, fellated microphones, and rupturing Heinekens that makes even non-francophones moan, oui oui oui!

It’s the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ headlining Saturday night slot at the festival, and Karen, guitarist Nick Zinner and drummer Brian Chase have been giving the 5,000-strong throng some major eros for their Euros, while a gaggle of onlooking fellow Route du Rockers—including the Canuck contingent of Buck 65, Manitoba, Hot Hot Heat, and Broken Social Scene—are being seduced on stage left. After an hour of teasing, it’s time for Ms. O to go for the big O. As Zinner strums out the Velvet Underground-y melody to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ signature song, “Our Time,” and just before the song reaches its sardonic punchline—“it’s our time to be hated”—Karen jumps into the crowd and issues her challenge: “Okay, do you guys know this part?”

She thrusts her microphone into the face of one mosher, who responds with a polite “Hello! Hello!” The next respondents offer up a not-quite-so-melodious “Yeeeeeaahhh!” and “Motherfucker!” And then Karen tries to force a duet with a dude in Spider-Man outfit who clearly doesn’t know the words, before she breaks down in laughter over this disastrous attempt at crowd participation and simply exclaims, “Jesus fucking Christ!”

Welcome to stardom in the year 2003, where fashion-mag fame can make you ubiquitous, even if your songs are not.

“I’m always surprised how sheltered we are,” Karen says during a pre-show interview in Route du Rock’s backstage compound, where, sans her onstage accoutrements, she seems as demure and congenial as a Belle and Sebastian fan. “We get calls from press people all the time asking us, ‘What does it feel like to be famous?’ And we’re like, 'What?’ We’re totally, totally confused, because I think we all live really low-key lives. We’re not tapped into the whole fame thing, we’re not hanging out doing coke with P. Diddy.”

And it’s not like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs ever imagined their lacerating controto-disco-punk would ever play outside of their Williamsburg neighbourhood, let alone constitute anyone’s idea of commercially viable pop music. But where their 2001 debut five-song EP was appropriately primitive and fractured, onstage the Yeah Yeah Yeahs became a fiercely funky unit, with Chase rocking hi-hat rhythms that threaten to topple his kit, Zinner making like a one-man Sonic Youth, and Karen coming on like an epileptic nymphomaniac, a performance style she initially attributed to being “really, really, really sloshed.”

After a star-making 2002 showcase at South by Southwest—where, literally overnight, the band transformed from indie curios to front-page fodder—the band soon found itself on the same payroll as U2 and Eminem on Interscope Records, while Karen’s skewed sartorial style made her something of a punk-rock Kate Moss figure (with friend/personal designer Christiane Joy assuming a Stella McCartney-of-the-underground role).

“It was an extremely precarious position to be in,” Karen says. “We could easily say, ‘Let’s write a song like “Bang,”’ and just revisit what got people excited in the first place, but I think it’s totally against our best interests. It was a really difficult time for us, because everything moved so ridiculously fast.”

Adds Zinner, “The reason that we signed with the people we did is because they said that they would be supportive of us just pursuing our own path. We made it pretty obvious that we were different from a lot of bands, just in the sense that we’re constantly changing and kind of difficult to work with. But they were respectful of that.”

Any fears that major-label money would temper the Yeah Yeahs Yeahs into some kind of New York post-punk answer to No Doubt were assuaged by the release of Fever To Tell this past spring. Mixed by My Bloody Valentine cohort Alan Moulder, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ full-length debut is every bit as finger nail-filthy as the band’s EP, but bolstered with a deadly dancefloor thump, while introducing dramatic mood shifts— most notably on the aching “Maps.”

In its throat-grabbing immediacy, its surprising emotional depth and its quasi-conceptual bent (Side One: party; Side Two: hangover), Fever to Tell proves they have enough songwriting smarts to outlast the current wave of NYC chic—that is, if it’s not already over.

“The blandness of what’s coming out of New York right now is so apparent,” Zinner says. “A lot of the bands that are starting to rise up are so self-conscious, so aware of the record industry and getting signed. That defeats the whole purpose of it.”

“It’s fucking worrisome how fast culture moves,” says Karen. “But then, I picked up this old issue of New York Rocker magazine, and all the articles were like, 'Is rock dead?’ And this was at the time of Gang of Four, ESG, Liquid Liquid, Blondie, Sonic Youth—all these bands that everyone went apeshit for in the past couple of years—and all these articles were like, 'Are these bands bullshit? Is punk dead?’ And that was 20 years ago! It’s all about cycles, dude.”

But then Karen isn’t going to wait for Brooklyn’s best-before date to pass her by. As she admits: “I live in Jersey now.”

ENCORES

“Heads Will Roll” is the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ top-streamed track (and its A-Trak remix is a close second), and “Maps” remains the sentimental fan favourite, but in my perfect world, this power-pop knockout from 2006’s Show Your Bones is their signature song:
Twenty years and three months after our date in France, I got to see Yeah Yeah Yeahs in Toronto at History, and they looked and sounded pretty much exactly as they did in 2003, albeit with a little less spit beer and a lot more confetti. And for anyone who had to go to the bathroom during “Date With the Night,” the band was kind enough to hit the pause button until you finished your business: