Fever To Tell

Karen O turns raw sexual bravado inside out on this record, spending most of it shrieking and spitting only to crack open at the end and reveal she was terrified the whole time.

"Maps" is where the mask drops: over a guitar figure that just circles and waits, she pleads "wait, they don't love you like I love you" until her voice frays, and the swagger of everything before it suddenly reads as armor. Nick Zinner builds the whole album on that trick, wringing enormous noise from a guitar-drums-vocals trio with no bassist to hide behind, so the empty space around each riff feels dangerous rather than thin. The blown-out lust of "Date With the Night" and the closing hush of "Modern Romance / Poor Song" are the same person, and the sequence forces you to hear one inside the other. Countless bands chased that combination of trash and tenderness afterward; almost none of them landed both.