Do you remember where you were on the night of September 12, 2006? Fans and converts of TV on the Radio certainly wouldn’t forget. That night, the New York group made their late night debut on The Late Show With David Letterman, ripping through a performance of “Wolf Like Me” that damn near left a smoldering crater in the stage at the Ed Sullivan Theater. After a few years of consistent touring, the group was locked in and surging with energy—bass buzzing, rhythms pulsing, and vocalist Tunde Adebimpe showcasing what remains one of the best set of pipes in rock music, the emotional eye of the band’s sonic maelstrom. It ripped at the time, and it’s since become canon; Bartees Strange has cited that moment as one of the most influential in the shape of his musical career, and there are several Reddit threads that proclaim it among the greatest late night performance of all time. And they’re almost certainly right about that.
But that network TV audience was simply becoming clued in to a presence and intensity that I’d been lucky to see three years earlier. In fall of 2003, shortly after the band made their EP-length debut as a duo, then expanding to a trio and subsequently a quintet, TV on the Radio made an appearance at The Casbah in San Diego, sandwiched between the long-since-defunct Kill Me Tomorrow and the existed-longer-than-you-thought comedy act Pleaseeasaur. But even if they didn’t headline, TV on the Radio indicated that’s where they were headed, burning straightaway into a hypnotic basher of a performance of Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes opener “The Wrong Way,” which was still months from being released. Thick with fuzz, the song seemed to propel the band rather than vice versa, as if they were lulled into a trance by its garagey grooves. I’d never seen anything like it, and I still haven’t, other than when I saw the group play it again the next year, even tighter, but no less mesmerizing.
Originally formed by vocalist Tunde Adebimpe and guitarist/producer Dave Sitek, TV on the Radio made their introduction via 2003’s Young Liars, a post-post-punk document of desire and dystopia that sounded like the future even as it reflected the darkness of the present. Its first song, “Satellite,” places the listener in the context of the disorientation and fear of 9/11: “Waiting for a signal or a sound/Where can you be found, now?” Released less than a year later, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes didn’t escape the darkness of the era, but with a full-band sound—including Jaleel Bunton’s live drums on a couple songs, opener “The Wrong Way” being one of them—the group sounded as if they had clad themselves in armor, facing the future wasteland with the densest sounds they had.
Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes harbors no illusions about the bleakness of the moment; its second song is titled “Dreams,” a dense, shoegazey dirge that makes explicit that “all your dreams are over now.” “Bomb Yourself” is their most explicitly antiwar statement, an abrasive funk that finds Adebimpe and Kyp Malone yelping “You’ve made a family/Now kill them dead.” The Suicide-gone-Afrobeat drone of “Don’t Love You” fills the opening of a vast gap with reverb and delay, and on the gorgeous a cappella of “Ambulance”—one of the few genuinely excusable contemporary a cappella songs—Adebimpe compares a lover to a “screech and crash.”
Sometimes the clouds part and the light breaks through with hilarious articulation, as when Adebimpe and Malone warn the powers that be, “Cover your balls/’cause we swing kung fu.” And the landscape is sometimes less littered with actual shrapnel than cultural landmines, as in the narrative of experiences as a Black person in white spaces in “The Wrong Way”: “I woke up in a magic n— movie/With the bright lights pointed at me, as a metaphor/Teaching folks the score.”
Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes is also horny in a way that few rock bands can successfully pull off with a straight face or without resorting to sweat and leather cliches. (Judas Priest’s particular brand of sweat and leather being a notable exception.) Within the doo-wop shoegaze of “Poppy,” Adebimpe dials into “what the geese were all roaring about,” and the downtempo slow-burner “Wear You Out” goes through eight verses before it finally directs its object of desire to the song’s unambiguous title. Even the album’s lead single “Staring at the Sun,” which was likewise featured on Young Liars, looks to sex as prescription for pre-apocalyptic despair. And yet a line like “Your mouth is open wide/The lover is inside” is somehow paradoxically more direct and yet far less vulgar than “Wolf Like Me”‘s “gotta bust that box/gotta gut that fish.”
TV on the Radio emerged during a time when New York had supposedly reclaimed its rock ‘n’ roll mojo, and The Strokes and Interpol were competing for the covers of magazines still in print at the time. And in Lizzy Goodman’s oral history of New York’s rock revival, Meet Me in the Bathroom, TV on the Radio are a substantial part of that story. But if anything, they’re more of a 21st century band than those groups in large part because they never sounded beholden to 20th century ideas. There aren’t many precedents for an album like Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes—if there are any. It bottles a particular strain of endtimes anxiety with a view of the skyline, filtered through guitars that streak like beams of light. It seems fortuitous now, in a new age of American disaster, that TV on the Radio have returned to the stage. Nothing shakes you out of an existential malaise like being literally shaken to life by the bassline of “The Wrong Way.”
Treble is supported by its patrons. Become a member of our Patreon, get access to subscriber benefits, and help an independent media outlet continue delivering articles like these.
