Sacrilege

Album: Mosquito (2013)
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Songfacts®:

  • The first single by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs from their Mosquito album finds Karen O singing about "falling for a guy" with a "halo round his head." The track was premiered on February 25, 2013 on Zane Lowe's UK BBC Radio 1 show.
  • The bombastic, epic song's concept of the violation of the sacrosanct is emphasized during its outro as a 24-piece gospel choir takes the song to a spiritual climax.
  • The video stars British model turned actress Lily Cole as a promiscuous character who has a number of affairs with local residents (you might have seen her in Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus ). None of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs members make an appearance in the conceptual clip.
  • As the Broadway Gospel Choir recorded their vocals for this song, Karen O stood in the center of the group, absorbing the vibration of their pleading and praying. "I never experienced anything like that, man," she told Spin magazine. "It was hair-raising, it was spine-tingling."
  • Karen O told NME that the first version the band was recorded of this song was terrible. "Then it hit me," she continued. "'You know what would make it really great? A gospel choir.' I'd been listening to Lou Reed's Transformer a lot and I loved those soulful back-up singers."
  • Karen explained the song's meaning to NME: "You can think of this as someone who's out of your league and not knowing if you can hold court with them," she said. "It also could be about finding out something about someone you don't know already. There's a lot of Earth angels out there, man."

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