From darkness, light

Karen Orzolek has a giddy, machine-gun rattle of a laugh that's cute and endearing. But if you're not careful she'll use it to dangerous effect. Such as when she's flustered by a question, or embarrassed about something, or just a little tongue-tied. Out it comes, The Laugh, and if you don't stay on your toes, the conversation will have already moved on towards safer territory. It's not what you expect from a woman who made a name for herself leaping across stages, shrieking provocative lyrics in costumes that could make Lady Gaga blush.

"The most outrageous of all was the pepperoni pizza dress," the Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer known as Karen O says with a grin. "That was like a deconstructed prom dress. It was painted fluorescent, like if a baby puked up toxic vomit, with weird circles the colour of pepperoni all over the breastplate. Then it had these black-and-white-striped stuffed dildos coming off the shoulders. It was so gross but I did wear it - once!"

Thirteen years ago, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were a scratchy outfit living in New York's Lower East Side and dismissed as a "fashion band". But what those critics didn't see was that among the more riotous songs were startling moments of tender yearning, such as Maps (the video of which saw Karen O weeping real tears). That the band managed to get this delicate balance right was striking. That Karen O somehow managed to do it while dressed in, for example, a nun's habit and gas mask is even more impressive.

If being a Yeah Yeah Yeahs fan means steeling yourself for the odd surprise, it's still hard to fathom how most will react to the new album, Mosquito. It's Blitz!, the previous disc, was itself a departure, leaving the band's trademark scuzzy guitar sound for a sleeker, electronic palette. Mosquito, however, is far more outre. There are songs about alien invasions and premature burial, with many of the tracks swamped in the kind of spacey, echo-laden sounds more usually found in dub reggae. Elsewhere, there's a 24-piece gospel choir.

" Blitz was so clean and cold in a way," Karen O says. "It was precise and electronic. I personally wanted to do something a bit more quirky, a bit more sexual, a bit more visceral."

Despite the new record's celebratory vibe, it emerged from a dark place. Burned out from a mammoth tour, the band started thinking about making Mosquito at the start of 2010, a year guitarist Nick Zinner describes as "super-dark". While Zinner struggled to deal with an "epic break-up that seemed to last forever", Karen O was tangled up in her own despair. "I wouldn't wish that feeling on my worst enemy," she says today. "I felt stuck in a ditch that I couldn't climb out of. It was actual depression, for about six months."