Rock has always been about battles—especially the one called Me Against the World—and for six years, Yeah Yeah Yeahs have been its reigning barroom brawlers. Ever since singer Karen O spit her first beer on the front row, she’s been a terror in torn fishnets, baring her teeth while her band serves up boiling-oil guitar bursts and clobbering beats. On 2006’s Show Your Bones, the fight turned inward: New York’s favorite basement band was suddenly almost famous, and buckling under the anxiety. The record was beset by bickering—you could hear the friction in the music, as O’s wail often seemed to be in a shoving match with Nick Zinner’s guitar. “Sometimes I think that I’m bigger than the sound,” she sang. But she didn’t sound so sure. How to ease band tension? With a dance-off! On their third full-length, recorded in pastoral locales across the country, Yeah Yeah Yeahs throw a goth disco party. On “Heads Will Roll,” which jerks like a Factory Records 7-inch, O’s only enemies are wallflowers: “Dance till you’re dead!” she cackles. On “Zero,” quick-throbbing synths and quasi-orgasmic vocals worthy of Donna Summer deliver that close-your-eyes high you find in clubs with mirrored tables. As the beat goes on, Karen O shouts like she’s on a very loud dance floor, trying to identify the DJ’s last song. “Was it the Cure?/‘Shellshock’?” she cries. Whatever it was, it’s something else now. And that something sounds like bliss.

If Yeah Yeah Yeahs sound less frazzled, it’s no coincidence that Zinner has stopped wielding his guitar like a flamethrower (at times he even abandons it altogether). Instead, he lends a blinking, West African–esque melody to “Dragon Queen” and ethereal shoegazer riffs to “Hysteric.” Meanwhile, drummer Brian Chase trades his two-sticks-of-dynamite thwack for cooler, hip-swinging beats and simple tick-tock pulses. And Karen O gets so tender, her words could’ve come from an Anaïs Nin paperback (“complete me,” “my mouth is touching,” “the glitter’s all wet”). The girl can still bring the drama, but she saves it for songs about the scene queen she used to be. “Dull Life” shows how far she’s come: “Last on the village scene/Fall apart/Iron heart/More alive than you’ve ever been.” That’s the past few years of her 
life, summed up like a recovery story. And why not? It’s Blitz! is the sound of a band reborn with new momentum, and on an album that requires dancing, the message is clear: It doesn’t matter where you came from. Just keep moving.
Download “Zero,” “Hysteric,” “Dull Life”