Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Leadmill, Sheffield<br></br>Nas, Astoria, London<br></br>Tuuli, The Peel, Kingston-Upon-Thames

So that's where indie went ...

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs come with baggage. I mean this both literally – lead singer Karen O designs super-exclusive handbags – and figuratively. For the first time since the heyday of Elastica, significant numbers of indie kids are buying into a band who aren't just cool as a by-product of what they do, but a band whose very raison d'être is to coolness.

The NME's recent brown-nosed list of the Top 50 Coolest People In The World featured countless shots of garage rockers wearing either a badly-knotted tie, ripped tights, sunglasses indoors, or a fag hanging from their lower lip. Karen O, in a truly desperate case of trying too hard, ticked every single box. It was difficult not to guffaw. Indie Britain is currently disappearing so far into the posterior of the New York scene that rescue parties have called off the search until daybreak.

So why, confronted by the physical reality of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in Sheffield, am I smiling for entirely different reasons? Because – however much Karen's stylised self-love is an irritant (she moves like a mannequin, striking a pose she's happy with, and holding it until she thinks of a new one) – the YYYs play with a new wave conciseness which is as pop as their why-didn't-someone-think-of-it-before? name.

"Bang", of course, is a hilarious and hard-hitting hymn to cock ("the bigger, the better..."), and Karen sings like bubblegum-chewing street trash; her do-you-kiss-your-mother-with-that-mouth? lyrics ("I need the real thing tonight/ Yeah yeah yeah yeah", "I've been screwing on the tracks of abandoned train stations") are frequently entertaining.

After a terse, punk-rock-short set, they encore – not that punk rock, then – with their finest moment, "Our Time", which sounds like the Velvets covering Joan Jett's "Crimson and Clover" (itself a cover of... oh, who cares). When you've heard that, you'll forgive the Yeah Yeah Yeahs any amount of hand luggage.

Ever since the So Solid shooting, hip-hop gigs at the Astoria come with security checks tighter than Boston Airport after 9/11. The show by Nas is officially a sell-out, but the balcony is half-empty, presumably for crowd control reasons. Nas himself goes onstage at the improbably early hour of 8.20pm, also, one imagines, for similar purposes.

With an atmosphere like tonight's, it all seems so unnecessary. When Nasir Jones takes the stage in a super-cool leather military coat, his sheer charisma projects from the front of the stage to the back of the gods and puts smiles on every face. In purely technical terms, Nas is recognised as peerless, but this is no dry exhibition of technique.

Rather than mindlessly plug the (magnificent) latest album God's Son, we get an immaculately chosen decade-spanning set which stretches from "Thugz Mansion" (dedicated to dead duettist 2Pac) back through "If I Ruled The World" to his rightly-legendary Illmatic album; the local break-dancers invited to spin on their heads to Melle Mel's "White Lines" reinforce Nas's commitment to hip-hop history. It's a welcome and joyous contrast to the bovine bellowing of his rival Jay-Z at Wembley the other week. Beat that, jigga man.

Toronto girlpunks Tuuli are breaking Britain's balls the hard way. The band's first UK tour is a 28-date marathon, slogging around such rock'n'roll hotspots as Frome, Nuneaton and Whitehaven. Date 24 takes them to a rough part of Kingston-Upon-Thames, where the quartet, looking like Josie And The Pussycats without the ears-for-hats, show England's poshest punk kids that there's more to life than nu-metal and reheated ska.

Tuuli – it's Finnish bassist Claire's middle name, FAQ fans – first showed up on the radar with 2000's wryly-titled Rockstar Potential mini-album on the Sympathy For The Record Industry label. With sardonic lyrics like "it was so nice to swap fluids with you" (on the good-riddance song "Sunshine") and a little tATu-esque intrigue courtesy of a cover of The Vibrators' "Baby Baby", first impressions suggested a girl-group Ramones (which is pretty much what the Ramones were anyway).

To call Tuuli "the Canadian Donnas" would be crass – bearing the insulting implication that there's only room for one female punk-pop quartet per country, but an infinite number of vacancies for the male variety – so I won't do it. Although they do have their own "40 Boys In 40 Nights" ("10 Miles To Go", adjusted to include a reference to playing "24 shows in a row"), and they do share certain similarities of spirit.

A closer comparison, perhaps, is Kenickie, the much-missed Sunderland teenpop foursome of the mid-Nineties. Bottle-blonde singer/guitarist Jenny MacIsaac looks like a cross between Kenickie's Lauren Laverne and a punk rock Cameron Diaz, the back-and-forth "bitch-slut-whore" banter onstage is reminiscent of Laverne and her sidekick Marie Du Santiago, and if the line "So you took me to the cinema" isn't a deliberate echo of Kenickie's "Can I Take You To The Cinema?", there's more to this telepathy lark than meets the eye.

Their finest moment is "It's Over", featuring a guitar riff borrowed from "Faster" by the Manics. By the time "Here We Go" inspires mass overhead handclaps, Kingston is theirs. The affection is reciprocal. "We wanna come back to England ASAP," Jenny promises. "I need to marry somebody. Any takers? Meet me over by the merch table. I'm a little sweaty, but I'm a nice person. I can't cook, but I can do laundry. We can work it out..."

s.price@independent.co.uk

Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Zodiac, Oxford (01865 420042), tonight; Mean Fiddler, London W1 (020 7434 9592), Tue