Yeasayer: About Brooklyn

The off duty Brooklyn lives of Yeasayer’s Chris Keating, Ira Wolf Tuton and Anand Wilder are canonized by their close friend, fashion and portrait photographer Anna Palma. The band is often associated with abstract visuals that reflect the hallucinatory complexity of their music, but Palma’s images show them hanging out in their natural habitat, in diffuse sunlight and hugging. "We don't like posing for photographs," says frontman Keating. "But with Anna we're just working with a friend." Often swapping roles in the studio—from vocals to drums, Harmonic Octave Generators to cellos—the trio is gearing up to tour their third album, this summer's Fragrant World, for which they recruited additional musicians to add strings, melodyne and kalimba to their psychedelic pop vibe. The result sows layer upon layer of digital and analog sounds to form lush symphonic gardens. Expanding on the latest album title, Keating cites how certain aromas can trigger sudden, emotional memories of the past. Fragrant World taps that nostalgia and complements it with an at times melancholic take on how our day-to-day lives are changing. "When you write a record certain themes naturally come to the front, and I was certainly interested in the consequences of new technologies," he explains. That curiosity is made audible in the twinkling melody of single “Henrietta”, with hypnotic, droning melodies set to the refrain, “We can live on forever.”