Yeah Yeah Yeahs' 'Cool It Down' is an exhilarating yet unhurried return

https://www.npr.org/2022/09/30/ [login to see] /yeah-yeah-yeahs-cool-it-down-album-review
The audacity, to be an artist who waits nearly a decade to release a project — to sit out the conversation that long. The news cycles that whirr by, the social feeds left to rot on the vine. The refusal to chase the currency of constant, insistent relevance. It's jarring nowadays. And when that artist is, say, a beloved rock band that's demonstrated near-pathological urgencies — to wail the most stirring choruses, to plumb the deepest melancholies and the raciest elations, to spray beer in your face and leave you begging — it's an even louder vacuum.

But when you've built up faith in an artist's vitality — when you believe they've spent a silence curating, not idling — it can feel gratifying to follow their lead. That's an even rarer trust a creator can inspire; we don't see it often. Richard Linklater's Before trilogy comes to mind — three films that each waited nine years between release, dropping in on its loquacious heroes Celine and Jesse at pivotal moments in their romance, their conversations always shooting out sparks. In the third installment, Before Midnight, Celine marvels at how strange it is to have a conversation with Jesse "about something else than scheduling, food, work," as they amble through impossibly photogenic Greek ruins — but, given our investment in them already, we're certain these characters (and the creatives behind the camera) haven't spent the past years entirely mired in domestic tedium; their sharp minds have been deliberating, stirring, building toward this substantial dialogue. And though we may have been eager to reunite with them, really, we wouldn't have wanted to eavesdrop on them any sooner.