Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Show Your Bones

The album that proved the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were built to last. Released on March 22, 2006, Show Your Bones is Karen O, Nick Zinner, and Brian Chase's sophomore record and one of the most successful second albums in modern indie rock, debuting at number eleven on the Billboard 200, reaching number seven in the UK, and quadrupling the first-week sales of their already celebrated debut Fever to Tell. It earned the band a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Album and sold over half a million copies in the US alone.

The story behind the album is as compelling as the music. In early 2005, the band scrapped everything they had written and started over, determined not to make Fever to Tell Part 2. The sessions that followed were fractious and creatively dangerous, the band pushing against each other and against their own instincts until something genuinely new and genuinely theirs emerged. As Karen O has described it, the pressure to reinvent themselves was intense, the experience was terrifying, and the reward was extraordinary.

The result is an album of fire, ferocity, and unexpected tenderness. Lead single "Gold Lion," with its Zeppelin-esque groove-stomp and swaggering drum beat, announced a band that had found a new and more expansive version of itself. "Cheated Hearts" is the album's emotional peak, Karen O shouting "sometimes I think that I'm bigger than the sound" before a thunderous guitar riff answers her with the whole weight of the song behind it. The Los Angeles Times called it minimalist rock with real feeling and a subversive, epic range, and that description holds twenty years on as well as it did on release.

Now pressed on magenta, yellow, and purple vinyl echoing the album's vivid cover art, this RSD Essential edition is the definitive way to celebrate one of the great indie rock albums of its decade.