Yeah Yeah Yeahs -- the arch and arty trio notoriously from Brooklyn -- have, since their first show at Mercury Lounge in 2000, put the "ew" into New Wave Revivalism. Singer/fashion plate Karen O, stun-gunning guitarist Nick Zinner and hammer-heady drummer Brian Chase have done this with a slurry salacious pop sound resembling Blondie’s "Hanging On the Telephone" and The Pretenders’ "Precious" forced through the frayed speaker netting of art-punks Wire, The Fall and Pussy Galore. Their retro-fashion look carries the same influence (to them) and weight (to fans). Maybe the lipstick’s a little messier or the dice-and-splice dresses a little choppier, but you get the point.

"Yeah, like, you know, we knew that most people hadn’t heard any actual music," laughs Karen O, chatting on the phone but obviously distracted by an NME cover shoot that could start at any minute. "I think we were, like, you know, as curious to hear an album as anybody."

That she’s sitting in YYY’s new home/rehearsal studio complex in upstate New Jersey (the near-Manhattan area she grew up in) is the first sign of having been hyped. "The quality of living got to be pretty low," says O about the current hipness of Brooklyn and the shabby space she and her partners shared. "We couldn’t make music because it got to be, like, you know, distracting. It was a dump. Too many people all around all the time. Now we have space, and …" she trails off.

Trailing off. Talking fast. Being distracted. Laughing while speaking. Saying "like, you know" with cheery alarm and mind-numbing constancy. It’s all part of Karen O’s charm, something she immediately associates -- as a person, artist and musician -- with having the "shortest ever attention span ever."

Fever To Tell has the furious feel of fleeting memory; the anger and fear of drifting through a life of love neverlasting, of guys who make you want to kill ("Man") or make you hate yourself ("Black Tongue"). Whether these people are displayed via hard fast rock ("Y Control") or the dreary dub of "No No No" or the positively epic near-ballad "Modern Romance," Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ music and O’s lyrics are like the weirdo in Memento -- a person ill at ease in his surroundings and skin due to the fact he can’t remember.

"I never fit," she says of her teen years -- the private high school she attended, the clothes she wore. "I was punky. Yeah. I measured myself by how different I was to everyone around me. At the end of my senior year, I won the student poll for "Most Atypical.’ Me and some guy who was a graffiti artist who didn’t talk to anyone. So high school? No. Jersey suburbs? No. Never fit. But I was lucky because I had New York City at my doorstep."

She’s fortunate, too, that she went to college; first at Oberlin, the Ohio liberal arts university where she was introduced to further adventures in the underground via jazz/heavy metal freak Chase, then to NYU where she met photography major/scenester Zinner. "Before I met Brian and Nick, I learned to play guitar in college for a project. Ohio is so depressing in the winter, and bleak and cold. I taped what I did on some shitty four track -- my voice, my guitar. It made my voice like four octaves higher. Not good. But it was cathartic. It taught me how to deal with my short attention span: Just document anything and everything I think."

Growing up, O’s heroes, visually and musically, were the most mainstream: Madonna and Michael Jackson. She says the Mad-Jacko radio-pop ideal is something she shared, then and now, with her bandmates, despite their arty exterior. It’s an idea they carry into YYY, albeit with "subversive" twists. You can hear this in the softest of Fever’s songs, like "Maps." You can see it in the Christian Joy designs wrapped around O like a snake skin.

After O met Christian Joy at designer Daryl K’s shop in Manhattan, style also became part of the YYY motif. Joy’s designs -- messed-up prom dresses, car-crash skirts -- would add to what the singer envisioned as her then "building personae."

"We test each other," says O of Joy’s designs. "Despite the fact that I feel that I have to live up to her ideas, her dresses, I’ll wear anything she makes for me. And she knows that. We both have the shortest attention spans."

"We like being able to make music that’s highly addictive and highly acceptable. Even though our version isn’t down the straight-and-narrow path. Our pop has that subversive angst to it."

That version of YYY’s nasty, sleazy, crusty-ass "pop" with a dirty-dress twist has remained constant since hitting the first notes of "Bang" that September night at the Mercury Lounge they opened for The White Stripes. "It was, you know, totally explosive. Totally spot-on. From the second we hit the stage, we knew we had it. We knew that what we were doing was right and would work." It has stayed with them through 2002’s most defining moment, at SXSW where they not only packed a room with a crowd of 2,000 people, and made the cover of every Austin newspaper, but wound up (for the first time) on the cover of NME.

O insists on defining both her look and YYY’s music as "Psychic A.D.D." It’s part of the YYY joke -- a ribald sense of sexed-up, zipless-fuck, anti-romantic humor that infects her and her immediate contemporaries. She means guys like The Liars and The Rapture, who have shared in the "Brooklyn movement" getting an over-avuncular batch of press accolades for the cause of rebuilding rock.

"It’s definitely a fast-and-furious thing, the hype. It matches the urgency of the music and the scene. That’s what our song "Our Time’ was about -- a rallying call. It was about rallying for the sake of rallying. That’s part of our humor too. Our peers have that same sardonic humor, a post-graduate collegiate sense of humor based on sex, scenester-ism and such."

Fever To Tell is, surprisingly, worth its hype -- a frankly sexual, tuneful and touchably soft yet noisy freakadelicized art-punk object that may indeed be one of the best laments on not fearing love despite being fucked with, as well as one of rock’s best-ever debuts. You know.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs will play Fri., April 4, 7:30 p.m., $8-$10, all ages, with Young People and The Seconds, First Unitarian Church, 22nd and Chestnut sts., 800-594-8499.