Credit: Found On Internet

It’s one of those cosmic co-incidences, but when I first saw the track listing for the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs EP, I thought they’d gone and recorded a concept record of Holly Valance covers. For one terrifying second, I though maybe New York’s artrock instrumentalists had gone so far up their lofty passages that they’ve recorded a bunch of tracks from a former Neighbours’ star.

Thankfully, that’s not proved to be the case.

Like some sort of glam-rock tease, ‘Rockers To Swallow’ sounds like Suzi Quatro if she’d been catapulted out of the 70s and instead had to record out of some bourgeois loft apartment on the Upper East Side. Nick Zinner’s guitar has regained some of that fierce sawblade edge that was lost somewhat for 2006’s ‘Show Your Bones’. It was what set the trio apart from their wetter contemporaries, and it’s good to hear it back.

‘Down Boy’ keeps the listener suitably at arms-length, suddenly rearing up from ghostly vibrations to a White Stripes-esque riff played by androids. ‘Kiss Kiss’ (the second of the Valance title-sharers) is probably the low point of the EP, sounding like a something cut from one of their albums for being slightly too bored with itself.

The screeching catsparks of ‘Fever To Tell’ may have died down, but there’s still some cold-fury at the heart of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. She might be aped, emulated and satorially analysed by an entire generation of fashionistas, but Karen O can still  whoop, holler, screech and yelp better than any of the scenester pretenders. If this EP is anything, it’s a clenched fist, with the band next album representing what they’re gonna do with it. Whether that means they lash out and crack a few jaws, or just stand there waving their clenched digits, like an ineffective and grumpy Scooby Doo villain, remains to be seen.

‘Isis’ EP is out now on Polydor.