Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Fever to Tell (2003)

Karen O's vocal performance — her screams and yelps as much a musical instrument as Nick Zinner's guitar — is the record's most distinctive element, a physical presence that separates the album from its No Wave and post-punk predecessors. 'Maps' is the emotional anchor, a slow love song delivered with a directness that Karen O has said she found almost unbearably vulnerable to release; 'Y Control' is the opposite, a controlled demolition with a guitar figure that cuts through the mix like a blade. It effectively closed the post-punk revival's first wave with a statement that exceeded its peers in physical intensity.

Sleeve notes

Fever to Tell · 2003

Karen O is one of the more charismatic frontpeople in rock — not in the traditional sense of stage presence, which is its own genre, but in the sense of being impossible to look away from when she's performing. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' early shows, which were genuinely confrontational, established an energy that Fever to Tell (2003) captured without diminishing. Nick Zinner's guitar — all riff, all attack, very little sustained note — gave the band its structural urgency; Brian Chase's drumming was its foundation.

The subsequent trajectory was ambitious: Show Your Bones (2006) added more formal structures; It's Blitz! (2009) took a hard turn into synth-pop, to largely positive effect. The band's willingness to try different things is admirable; the consequence is that the catalog is uneven in a way that the early records were not. Fever to Tell remains the statement: an album that sounds like it was made under pressure, by people who needed to make it.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Fever to Tell (2003)

Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Lower East Side