Karen O and Danger Mouse released the indie rock lullaby “Super Breath” Wednesday, marking their first song since their collaborative 2019 album Lux Prima. “Super Breath” delves into a rocky relationship marked by unfulfilled love. At the start of the chorus, Yeah Yeah Yeahs‘ Karen O sings, “Because you know I’m not satisfied/No, no, no, I’m not/But you keep on coming up.”
“Super Breath,” produced by Danger Mouse, drifts away from Lux Prima, a 9-track LP that conjoins Karen O’s “rough-around-the-edges heaviness” and Danger Mouse’s “star-gazing, atmospheric production” to create a “lush journey down the milky way of their rock ’n’ roll sensibilities” as Rolling Stone’s Brittany Spanos described in a 2019 review. Instead, “Super Breath” tiptoes around the red flags of a toxic relationship. The duo’s Lux Prima album will be reissued on Sept. 20 along with a separate 7″ of “Super Breath” on the A side and a previously recorded cover of Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” on the B side.
Lux Prima marked Karen O’s first album since Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Mosquito. In a 2019 Rolling Stone interview, Karen O talked about channeling feminine energy into Lux Prima track “Woman” while also taking artistic risks like working on the opera Stop the Virgens in 2011.
“Right now, I’ve been doing it for about 20 years,” the indie rock singer said of her decades long career. “The greatest currency of being an artist is getting to have the experience of the process, then put something out there in the world. There’s a lot of artists that have these dreams to do things, but something gets in the way and they back out. But if you get to have that experience, collaborating with people and trying something new together — that’s what I’m gonna be remembering on my death bed. Not the product, but the process.”
From Rolling Stone US