Usually getting into a band is a conscious choice for me. If I come across great reviews of singles, shows, and albums, like anybody, it would get my attention. Through that i would seek them out myself, watch some of their music videos on YouTube, and listen to their top songs on Spotify. Discovering the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in 2006 was something different.
I was in my last year of high school, and every morning before school there was this music show, who knows why it was on at 8 O’clock in the morning, must have been fate. Through this show I heard, for the first time, some of the biggest songs of the decade: Boulevard of Broken Dreams was the first song to be discovered this way two years earlier. Then one day I heard Gold Lion, heard is perhaps the wrong word, a better description was that I had a sensory overload. This band was visceral, little did I know that Gold Lion was actually a conscious move away from the pulverising songs on the band's debut Fever to Tell.
Gold Lion was a revelation, the video perfectly captured the elemental force the song achieves, which is also a perfect rural counterpoint to Fever to Tell's urban New York art-rock. Of course I developed an instant crush on frontwoman Karen O, how could I not; up until that point my musical diet consisted of pasty indie dudes, and I ignored pop completely. O was more dragon lady than gold lion, and while my crush is always there I would be an idiot not to appreciate the sheer force of personality she brings to the band. Coupled with Nick Zinner (who I immediately started dressing like, that dude was cool as fuck) and his towering guitar, which he played in a desert that was on fire, bad ass, Karen O and Gold Lion began a love affair with the band who are the most enduring acts of their time, mainly because out of four albums the first three are classics, and the fourth has their best single. Gold Lion really did show me where the light is.
