Karen O Pens “I Shall Rise” For New Tomb Raider Game, Gives Yeah Yeah Yeahs Update

Yeah Yeah Yeahs‘ Karen O has been involved with a number of film soundtracks over the past several years – Where the Wild Things Are, Her, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – and in the past week, she’s been back in the soundtracking game, this time for a TV show and a video game.

Not long after covering Animotion’s “Obsession” for the opening sequence of Starz’s ballet-themed drama Flesh and Bone, Karen has penned “I Shall Rise”, a new original song for the upcoming video game Rise of the Tomb Raider, which is slated to hit stores November 10, as Rolling Stone points out. Below, check out an excerpt of the song as part of a trailer for the forthcoming game; the track will be released in full tomorrow.

Speaking with Rolling Stone, Karen O – who clarifies that she is not a gamer – offered her thoughts on the new track and explained how it came to be:

It all sounded really tasty. They wanted drama and high-stakes and melodrama. That was very appealing to me because I love making music connected to a storyline. It was all stuff I loved like having the theme song to [Lara Croft] becoming an icon and the creation myth to the moment she becomes Lara.

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman and her husband, Barnaby Clay, recently welcomed a son – an experience that she says inspired “I Shall Rise”:

Some of the themes [Microsoft] gave me was transformation and survival and realizing one’s own destiny and pushing past one’s own limits, which is basically everything I’ve been going through with a newborn baby the past two months. I’ve been going through my own transformation.

Last year, Karen O said that Yeah Yeah Yeahs were on “a bit of a hiatus”: an arrangement that seems unlikely to change anytime soon, based on her comments in Rolling Stone. “It’s just waiting to see how everything works out with starting a family and seizing the moment when it strikes,” she told the magazine, “I’m in the full-time job of [motherhood] at the moment.”

Revisit our 5-10-15-20 with Karen O.

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