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Jun 24, 2013 By Mike Hilleary Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Filming the music video for their latest Mosquito single “Despair,” New York City trio the Yeah Yeah Yeahs decided to capture themselves playing on top of Manhattan’s most iconic landmarks: the Empire State Building.

The first band to successfully get permission to film a music video on the skyscraper’s observation deck, frontwoman Karen O says in a press release “There’s been a lot of career highs and lows over the years of being in a band, but in the end, how many can say they shot a video on the top of the Empire State Building? We win. Move out the way, King Kong, Yeah Yeah Yeahs are gonna get real with you up in this piece!”

Directed by longtime collaborator Patrick Daughters the clip begins with the individual band members in the last throes of their own long time, meeting together to play as the sun rises over the city. “I felt like I could give as personal a performance because of our history together,” says Karen O. “It was important to us that it felt intimate despite being filmed at one of NYC’s most famous landmarks and an international cultural icon. It was my first-ever trip up to the top of the ESB, top of the world, we were up there from 3am to sunrise, I’m guessing very few get to see that view from up there at those hours. I gotta say I had a ‘the impossible is possible’ moment up there with Nick and Brian. If someone would have sat us down at the Mars Bar years back and told us that we’d be performing our music on the top of the Empire State Building one day, we probably would have thought that’s the stuff that dreams are made of, not us, no way.”

(www.yeahyeahyeahs.com)