We’re very much here for the return of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Back in June Karen O and the boys hit us with a haunting new track, the Dave Sitek-produced “Spitting Off the Edge of the World”, featuring Perfume Genius, that served as the famed New York City trio’s first new music in nearly a decade. This week the fever rages forward with another new single in “Burning,” and like the last, it’ll be featured on the band’s forthcoming fifth studio album, Cool It Down, out September 30th via Secretly Canadian.
“Burning” is produced by Andrew Wyatt, and inspired by The Four Seasons’ “Beggin.” It’s almost Bond-theme-esque in its propulsive cool. We’ll let Karen O take it from here.
“Back when I was 19 living in the East Village, one night a roommate dragged me out of the apartment for an impromptu drink across the street, I left a votive candle burning on a plastic yaffa block which in my absence set flame to my room,” she writes. “Within an hour and a half of having one drink down the block firefighters had come and gone extinguishing the fire, I came home to find that a natural disaster had occurred (to my room) and most of my stuff, lost in the flames. All electronic goods were melted and demolished like my laptop, cameras, etc., but oddly enough the items that held the most sentimental value remained intact like sketchbooks, a favorite sweater with hearts across the chest, and photographs. I had photos of my parents in their youth where the fire burnt around the two of them as if there was some intangible force field protecting them, many photos like that, mysteriously leaving the beloved subjects untouched.”
She continues: “If the world is on fire I hope the most beloved stay protected and that we do all we can to protect what we cherish most in this life. ‘Burning’ is a song about that feeling, smoke signals for the soul. Begging to cool it down, just doing it the best we know how. Nick and I nodded to Frankie Valli’s ‘Begging’, with the line ‘Oooh lay your red hand on me baby.’ We’ve cut a rug to many a soulful ’60s bangers in our day, it was in our DNA by the time we wrote ‘Burning’.”
Fire it up below.