While ‘cutting edge’ is normally a euphemism reserved for overpriced audio equipment and sales conferences, if there was ever a band that could encapsulate the term for music, Brooklyn’s favourite sons, TV On The Radio, would be it.
Since releasing their debut EP, the universally hailed Young Liars, in 2003, the band have garnered consistent accolades for their utterly singular and modern sound, weaving futuristic soundscapes and 21st Century neuroses through a recognisable rock infrastructure.
That’s why it comes as no surprise when frontman Tunde Adebimpe is forced to speculate on whether or not the future of the band includes music at all. Speaking to Tone Deaf by phone, Tunde was more content to remark on the positive aura currently permeating the group.
“I just feel like we’re in a good place to keep making stuff and it might include music,” he says. “It might be another record, I definitely know that there a lot of aspects of the band and our friendship that we just haven’t really, I guess, put out there for people to watch or see.”
“I’m talking just visually in terms of making a show or something like that,” he clarifies, “we’ve been talking about that. I feel like it’s gonna turn into something else, it’ll be a continuation and I feel like this record was putting a ground floor in.”
Having spent over a decade as the world’s most interesting band, Tunde isn’t about to relinquish that reputation. “If we want to do it, if we’re invested in it, it’s gonna be something that surprises us and is hopefully interesting to other people,” he explains.
So is he willing to share any details of what the future of TV On The Radio, with or without music, might look like? “I can’t [laughs] But it’ll show up in pieces before the end of the year, absolutely.” Right now, the band is focusing on their latest acclaimed release, last year’s Seeds.
“I don’t know if it was something that I felt while we were doing it,” says Tunde of the recording process behind the record, which he’d previously touted as the band’s best effort ever, which is saying something when your track record is unrivalled by any of your peers.
“I know that the thing that struck me as different and really inspiring is that it seemed like we were working faster than we’d worked before. It was unspoken rule that if we started a song and it didn’t seem like it was in a shape by the end of the day we just kind of ditched it and started anew the next day,” he recounts.
“A lot of the songs got written, fleshed out into a point of near-completion in about one or two days and we had a lot of songs that didn’t make it onto this record. It was a really inspired time.” It wasn’t always this way. In fact, it never is.
“The band’s been together almost 13 years, technically, and after a while you get to a point where you feel like you’ve hit a wall with the language you know and then you step away from it for a while and you kind of see how you can either add on to it or subvert it completely.”
Following 2011’s Nine Types of Light, neither choice seemed to be an option. “After the last record we took a step away from it to recalibrate and figure out what we wanted to do. I think at that point, at least for me, I thought for the time being we’ve kind of done everything we know how to do.”
“[I felt] there’s no way to go back into this quickly without starting to retread a lot of ground and for me, retreading ground comes very close to the idea of faking it and I think it’s bad for your blood if you fake it, at least for me.”
As far as Tunde is concerned, faking it is death, at least creatively speaking. “I feel like from my perspective, progress or evolution as an artist is making everything you did before look like childish amateur hour, you know?”
“I don’t dismiss anything we’ve done or anything anyone’s done in their catalog, their life, or their art, but I think it’s almost like when you look at how you handle certain situations when you’re 16 and you think you know everything.”
“And then at 25, when you still don’t know anything, you look at yourself at 16 and think, ‘God, what an idiot’, and how poorly that person handled situation. ‘I’m not that person anymore and my perspective now is going to influence my choices.’ I guess it goes with being in a band, too.”
“Songs like ‘Wolf Like Me’ or ‘Staring At The Sun’ or others, I feel like I’m writing things that I would’ve loved to listen to when I was ages 16-25 or whatever, which is when so many of your concrete opinions about music or literature or culture are a big deal to you.”
“But like I say, we go out on stage and act like we’re 16, that’s a very vital thing, it’s the best parts of me when I was at that age, or any age where you feel something and it sends this electric shock down your spine.”
In fact, Tunde’s reticence to release another Return to Cookie Mountain or 12 versions of ‘Staring at the Sun’ not only forms the nucleus of his artistic approach, it goes back to the very foundations of the band.
“We were in a particular place when we used the word ‘stupid’ like that,” Tunde laughs when presented with a quote from the band’s early days, when he and guitarist Dave Sitek said they started TVOTR to be stupid in a way that was better than every other stupid thing.
“We’re older, we can’t be as free with cursing people out [laughs] I think what keeps us doing [TVOTR] is it’s a place that you can land. First off, to be working with your friends after such a long time and still have what at times seems like a psychic connection with people forming this thing, it’s a really lucky spot to be in.”
“You basically grow up and this is your family and you get to hang out and make things and the icing on that particular cake is that we’re not doing it in a vacuum… to to be lucky enough to have anyone care about what we’re doing is a really inspiring thing.”
“It’s just the idea of possibility that keeps us in the band, or just wanting to work with each other, because we don’t really have a style that we have to keep to or a haircut or a look that we have to keep fitting into, so it’s the idea of having a sort of open road.”
Back in 2011, TVOTR’s open road lost one of its travelling members. “I think we were all just glad to be back in there doing it because it was a heavy sort of period of years after Gerard [Smith, bassist] passed away,” Tunde recounts.
“We just kind of got back together just hanging out and ended up writing the songs ‘Mercy’ and ‘Million Miles’ while we were all hanging out and we put that out as a single. And it all just went very quickly.”
“I think taking time away from things you live a life and you go in and you process a lot of things and you realise a lot about your interactions with people, and your interactions with your work, and your interactions with life generally is a lot of selfish bullshit and selfish unproductive bullshit.”
“So when you go back into a room with basically your family who’s all been there with you through all of that selfish unproductive bullshit you realise how lucky you are just to be able to be like, ‘Okay, we can just come in here and be Voltron and make something that seems right to us.'”
The band will soon be touching down in Australia to perform as part of Vivid LIVE and Tunde is almost relieved when he explains how the band are finally at a point where they can faithfully recreate the novel sounds of their records on the stage.
“Just in the writing process, we had more of a clarity. I think when we were writing these songs, consciously or unconsciously, after seven years of touring it finally dawned on us that I wanna write something that we’ll be able to play every night the way that I’m singing it and writing it right now.”
“It’s actually been more fun to play them that way, and some of the other songs we’re just tweaking because we’ve played them for so long that we’re just trying to give them a different shape with the same kind of content.” Different shape, same kind of content, TV On The Radio in a nutshell.
TV On The Radio will perform as part of Vivid LIVE and during a series of national sideshows this month. For more info visit the official Vivid LIVE website or Live Nation.
