But it has to be said that Mosquito doesn't sound much like the work of a band whose confidence has been battered. You could, if you wished, take all this as evidence of a chastened band not sure what to do, now their bid for bigger things has failed. Their fourth album steps away from the sound of its predecessor, offering instead a scattershot array of styles: over the course of its 40 minutes, you variously get a gospel choir a track produced by LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, featuring rapper Kool Keith in his Dr Octagon guise synthesiser experimentation on These Paths a naggingly repetitive ode to wedded bliss called Always and – assume brace position now – a track apparently influenced by the nyabinghi, or Rastafarian spiritual music, of Ras Michael's Dadawah. It was confidently done, received by critics as if vast success was a foregone conclusion and sold no better than any other Yeah Yeah Yeahs album: the lead single, Zero, sounded like a mammoth hit right up to the point it stalled at No 49 in the singles chart. It's a state of affairs the band has sought to address in the past: 2009's It's Blitz! was, fairly obviously, a lunge for greater mainstream acclaim.

You get the feeling the average man in the street might be more readily able to identify a photo of frontwoman Karen O than hum you one of her songs. The latter seem the more surprising survivors, though the people who decried them as style over substance when they first emerged – in the 2006 documentary Kill Your Idols they took a real pasting from the old stalwarts of New York's art-rock scene – might note with satisfaction that the trio are more famous than they are commercially successful. In fact, only two artists could reasonably claim to be in better shape than they were a decade ago: Jack White and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Most of them are vanished or – perhaps worse, trudging glumly on in the face of diminishing returns. L ongevity wasn't chief among the attributes of the alt-rock bands who emerged at the start of the noughties.

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