New (Leaked) Music: Yeah Yeah Yeahs – It’s Blitz!

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

It's BlitzHas everybody in America thrown out their guitars? When do we get to call this a trend? Okay, sure, a quick look at the iTunes Top 100 shows All-American Rejects and Jason Mraz still wielding the axes in the Top 20. But there’s something New Wave-y in the air when even rapper Flo Rida hits #1 with a Dead or Alive cover and bisexual robo-pixie Lady Gaga is America’s sweetheart.

Into this synthtastic moment strut the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and while Nick Zinner’s noisy, careening guitar work has always defined the band’s sound, they’re also respectably New Wave, with an appreciation for accessible, dramatic pop melodies, not to mention Karen O’s colorful outfits. Over the last few years, they’ve even started offering up their hits for remixes, and Zinner himself has tried reworking the band’s songs for the dance floor. It feels completely natural that they’d turn to drum machines and keyboards on It’s Blitz!, and they still wring an organic, rich noise out of their gadgets.The question is, are they also squeezing good songs out of their heads? This is a band with a lot to live up to in that regard: “Maps,” from their 2003 debut, became an unexpected smash nearly a year after its release—it was the “Paper Planes” of its day. There are five ballads on this 10-track album, and while some are quite lovely, they all have the feeling of reaching for, but not quite touching, “Maps.” Track four, “Skeletons,” has a cinematic sweep, with a mournful keyboard melody and dramatic, pounding drums, but Karen O seems a little lost, unenthusiastically intoning “Love don’t cry,” and I’m not sure if it’s a statement or a request.

The uptempo half of the album is a little more successful: “Dull Life” brings back the guitars for a swinging four minutes, but if you’re going to copy “Lust For Life,” you need to change the title a little more. Okay, I’m being very critical, and I should say that I do like this band, and I’m enjoying this album, really. “Dragon Queen” has a quirky, Talking Heads feel, and lead single “Zero” (listen to it here) soars like Blondie covering OMD. But I miss the Yeah Yeah Yeahs who reached out and throttled my neck on “Date With the Night” and who got right to the point on “Gold Lion.” They used to be bigger than the sound; now, the sound is all there is.

It’s Blitz is out April 14 on Interscope.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate