Songfacts®:

• Yeah Yeah Yeahs formed in 2000 with a mission enliven the New York City music scene, which they thought had gotten boring and predictable. They had this same attitude in 2009 when they released "Zero," a song where lead singer Karen O jabs the listener with a shot of adrenaline.
  
  "We were living in New York at a time when people stood there with their arms crossed in the audience, and just felt really indifferent or ambivalent about music," she told Clash. "You wanted to just smack them, you know? Break a beer bottle over their head, to wake 'em up and make them feel something, and that's still what we want to do now. We want to shake the unshakable, to stir things up, and that's a lot of the spirit of 'Zero.' It's like, Come on man! Come on! Just feel something, escape, whatever, whatever the emotion is just feel it!"
• "Zero" was the lead single from Yeah Yeah Yeahs' third album, It's Blitz!, which found them downplaying their guitars and adopting a new synthesizer-driven sound. Frontwoman Karen O told The Sun March 13, 2009: "This is a new era for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. This record got our confidence back and was really a move towards enjoying being in a band again. We started off writing this record with guitars, but gradually the sound developed into what you hear now. We chose synths because they allow for more space. They have a quality which is different to Nick (Zinner's) grungy guitar sound. But, at the same time, Nick's synth work mimics what he does on the guitar. So in a way it was a natural progression."
• This song, along with the rest of the album, was produced by TV on the Radio's David Andrew Sitek and Nick Launay.
• The horns on "Zero" come courtesy of saxophonist Stuart Bogie and trumpeter Eric Biondo from the Brooklyn based Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra.
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs have many fans in the music press, both in America and England, who hailed this song as a triumph. Both Spin Magazine and the NME named it the Best Song of 2009.
• The music video was directed by Barney Clay and filmed in the San Francisco neighborhoods of Chinatown, North Beach, and Tenderloin. It finds Karen O walking down a road and dancing clad in a PVC outfit. Towards the end of the clip, the band play in a discount store, which in reality is the Cool Super Discount located at 199 Eddy Street, San Francisco.
  
  Noted film and music-video director Clay was also behind the camera for Depeche Mode frontman Dave Gahan's "Saw Something" and Gnarls Barkley's "Who Cares" videos. He and Karen O were dating at the time, and in 2011 they got married.