The Gospel of Karen O

The video for Sacrilege ends with a mob tearing apart the man Karen O loves while she watches. It is not subtle. It opens with a gospel choir and closes with violence, and somewhere in between it builds into the most convincing case I’ve seen for polyamory as a concept—even though, or maybe especially because, it ends badly for everyone.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs released this as the lead single from Mosquito in early 2013, and it has that specific quality Karen O’s best songs carry: it sounds like it exists in a different physics from the music around it. The choir shouldn’t work over those guitars. The tempo shouldn’t sustain at that level. And yet it moves exactly the way she wants it to, which has always been the thing about this band—her instincts are so precise that the strange starts to feel inevitable.