Originally a song known as Year to Be Hated, released on the 2000 compilation Yes New York, Orzolek had known that the lyric had legs. And me becoming a songwriter … it came as a complete surprise.” At the opposite end of the EP to Bang, Our Time reveals the other side of Orzolek’s split personality, she says. “It was one of the earliest songs I wrote on my own. This solo Orzolek composition, a soft epic, ended the band’s first EP. “New York audiences back then were half awake, half asleep, their arms folded, and I wanted to rock that boat. “The fact that she’d done it by herself with a four-track, just let loose, and completely unbridled – she taught me that I could do that.”Ī shy, well-behaved child who still liked writing tender songs, something happened to Orzolek when she became a frontwoman, she says. PJ Harvey’s 4-Track Demos had also had a huge impact. Orzolek was enamoured of the lo-fi aesthetic of the 2000 ESG compilation South Bronx Story at the time (“it was so stripped down, so badass”).
Bang was written in another life: in one night, with other songs from that first EP, in Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ guitarist Nick Zinner’s Brooklyn flat she already knew drummer Brian Chase from her studies at Ohio’s Oberlin College. I still look at that and I see that.”Įighteen years later, Orzolek is on the phone in in office of her director husband Barnaby Clay, in their Los Angeles apartment. “This was my headspace: bratty, complicated, angsty, sensitive 22-year-old living in New York at the turn of the millennium. “That was a selfie before its time!” says the woman on that cover today: Karen Orzolek AKA Karen O. Bought from an East Village S&M store, it reads “MASTER”, which felt a one-woman fuck-you to the boys-and-guitars indie world at the time.
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Her picture is cropped like a Polaroid: only the shaggy ends of a short bob, her full lips and a necklace on her bare chest can be seen. It is July 2001, and an EP with a 22-year-old frontwoman on its cover is flying out of independent record shops, reaching No 1 on the UK indie chart.
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