In April, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs filmed the first music video ever produced atop the Empire State Building, 86 floors up on the observation deck. That's right, in 82 years no one has shot a music video up there.
The band filmed their video for "Despair" from 2 a.m. until after sunrise, and according to CityRoom the shoot was kept a secret, with only a small crew involved.
The president of Malkin Holdings, operator of the Empire State Building, told the site "he agreed to the video to garner some cool points for his landmark—'To make sure that the Empire State Building isn’t frozen in people’s minds in An Affair to Remember and Sleepless in Seattle."
And the New York trio wasn't cool enough to admit how awesome the moment was±—Karen O said, “It was definitely an iconic moment. It’s hard to do something like that and not to feel like it’s symbolic—it’s like the American dream for us, singing your song on top of the Empire State Building, feeling like: man, where were we 10 years ago, when we were sitting around in some punk rock dive bar, thinking about what to name our band, and New York City, and now here we are at the top. It really felt dreamlike.”
The video will be making the rounds on Monday, but for now, here they are performing the song last night on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon:
