Nearly 25 years ago, Brooklyn band TV on the Radio took over the airwaves and MTV with their haunting, near-operatic synth-rock. Tracks like “Staring at the Sun” and “Wolf Like Me” seduced listeners with melodic hooks upon hooks, and an urgent, insistent percussive drive.
Leading man, Missouri-born, L.A.-based Tunde Adebimpe’s restless creative spirit never lost momentum, but the intensity and demands of band life lost its lustre until a 20th anniversary re-release and tour for album “Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes” in 2024 reunited TV on the Radio. Such was their renewed chemistry that the band are now in the throes of a new, sixth album. It will ride on the heels of Adebimpe’s debut solo album, “Thee Black Boltz,” which reinforces the fact that Adebimpe is one of the most adventurous, incisive singer-songwriters of the last few decades, at least.
The references to “boltz” are scattered throughout tracks, brief glimmers of gratitude and joy which emerge from clouds of gloom. Adebimpe tells The Times that the album mirrored his own experiences of being in, and coming through, a series of traumatic events and grief that intensified during the pandemic.
“[In 2019], I was doing a lot of free writing to get ideas, to put messy thoughts into a place, and I was visualizing a way out of a pretty heavy period of grief that I was in. I was writing about what had happened, making my way through it, and committing myself to documenting every way to get through it. In the middle of all that writing about grief, there were moments of remembering things that happened before the tragic events, and the gratitude for those little breaks, shots of inspiration, that wouldn’t have otherwise come to you without those clouds of depression. Boltz are a metaphor for shocking you out of a bad situation.”
“Boltz are a metaphor for shocking you out of a bad situation,” Tunde Adebimpe says about his debut solo album, “Thee Black Boltz.”
(Matt Seidel / For The Times)
Many of these songs were written during the onset and thick of the pandemic, when there was a feeling of panic and something encroaching that nobody with the power to stop it was actually acting on, he said. “American events, world events, felt intense and still do … It’s the feeling of elemental forces versus human beings, and that will never go out of fashion.”
A series of studio robberies — first Adebimpe’s home garage-studio, then the complex of studios he was working in — could have hobbled his momentum. So, too, could the round of rejections he got after trying to shop around six demos to no avail, but despite the elements putting up a fierce battle, Adebimpe prevailed.
“When TV on the Radio took a break in 2019, it was indefinite, and I was not in a place where I thought I’d be making music for a long time. A couple of things happened,” he said. “Somebody broke into my garage, which is my studio, and stole 15 years’ worth of archives, and my laptop. They unplugged the hard drive in my computer and left that there — a weird act of charity, or something? They took drum machines, my weed — the icing on the cake — but I found my old 4-track recorder and a box of tapes that went from 1998 to 2008.” The singer went through, listened to those tapes, and found half-finished songs that he brought out and re-demoed. “Since I had only the 4-track to record with, I started playing around with it and writing demos on it.”
His solo album hadn’t been anticipated by most, since the versatile Adebimpe had been thriving on a busy combination of acting (“Twisters” last year, “Spider-Man: Homecoming” and TV series “Star Wars: Skeleton Crew”), directing and collaborating across genres as both a guest vocalist or supergroup member.
He’s also been busy with touring TV on the Radio’s first album in celebration of its 20th anniversary. After their 2014 album “Seeds,” the band had toured on and off and released singles here and there. Outside the band confines, there’s been numerous shared projects since 2010 when Adebimpe featured on Dave Sitek’s album “Maximum Balloon.” He’s lent his signature urgent, momentous vocals to tracks by Massive Attack, Leftfield and Run the Jewels, and even found time to hook up with Faith No More and Mr. Bungle mastermind Mike Patton and Doseone in the supergroup Nevermen.
It seems surprising that it has taken so long for him to set out to make a solo album.
“I thought about it before,” he concedes. “The thing about being in TV on the Radio is that whenever we’ve all decided to get together to record a new thing, everyone comes with a bunch of new ideas and a lot of demos, and we always have a surplus of songs.” There have been times over the course of the band being together that they’ve had a little break, and Adebimpe thought about taking these songs that nobody else — for lack of time or interest — wanted to do anything with. “I wrote the demos; I don’t want to abandon them,” he said.
“I wrote the demos; I don’t want to abandon them,” Tunde Adebimpe says about songs that didn’t make the cut for TV on the Radio.
(Matt Seidel / For The Times)
The TV on the Radio DNA is there, undeniably.
“Sometime after 2008, I had a moment where I was like, what does a TV on the Radio song sound like? And that went through the band like a stomach bug, and we all realized we don’t really know because we’d never thought about that before. I can’t plan something out in that way. I write what sounds good to me and what works to me. I certainly don’t mind if people hear similarities, and I am never trying to get away from writing the way that I write.”
“Thee Black Boltz” is Adebimpe with nothing to prove. He’s not determined to differentiate his solo voice from his work with TV on the Radio, but there’s a definite shift in the mood here. Where there was an urgency and climactic intensity to TV on the Radio tracks, “Thee Black Boltz” revels in more space for introspection in the instrumentation and lyrics, whimsy and emotional candour. Over a concise 11 tracks, Adebimpe traverses heartbreak, drama, frustration and space exploration.
Rewind just over 20 years to Adebimpe crooning about the transience of material possessions, the inevitable human transcendence into light and air on “Staring at the Sun,” and “Thee Black Boltz” is merely the extension of Adebimpe’s long-running fixation on existence and our relative meaninglessness. New track “Drop” features Adebimpe’s own plea in the face of imminent death:
“We’re gonna feel it when we drop / Send no flowers / The visions never stop / Of this life / And a time / We can all come together / Burn so bright / And rise into the night.”
“Drop” opens up with bare-bones looped beatboxing before threading in dramatic melody upon layers of synth and howled refrains. This is not Adebimpe’s rebellion against TV on the Radio, but the evidence that in that band, and solo, he only knows how to be fully authentic.
“‘Drop’ came at the time when it felt apocalyptic during the pandemic,” he says. “I was thinking about people I’d lost, and thinking, what exactly do you feel when you die, when you drop this body that you live in? Is there nothing, not even a consciousness? We don’t know. It could be wonderful, or we could all be doomed, but we can think about that because we’re here now. What’s the best use of our very limited time on our planet?”
Adebimpe’s ephemeral musings on death became very real when his only relative in the U.S., his younger sister, died in 2021. A week after signing to Sub Pop with a handful of demos, he had to pause everything to react.
“What’s the best use of our very limited time on our planet?” Tunde Adebimpe muses on his debut solo album.
(Matt Seidel / For The Times)
“I’d started writing the record, and I didn’t know that I was writing a record. It was after all my stuff got stolen … so that was the minor, material stuff that happened. Then in 2021, out of nowhere, my younger sister passed away very suddenly. I don’t feel weird talking about this because everyone is going to experience some sort of massive upheaval and tragedy and it’s possible to get through it by focusing on the moment in front of you. She passed away very suddenly. I have no other family in the country, so I had to travel to Florida, organize the funeral, deal with her house, in a very short period of time.”
When he returned to L.A., “I didn’t want to do anything at all for a long time,” he says.
“But making things is a great way to process. I took the messy feelings, joyous feelings, and downloaded them into free writing, making demos for what eventually became the record as a way to get through it. I’d had losses throughout the years that I hadn’t taken the time to think about or make any kind of peace with, not that you ever can. The pandemic gave me a second.”
His sister is the focus of the song “ILY,” or “I Love You,” on the record.
“That song is entirely for her,” says Adebimpe. “It’s a simple, clear song and it’s multipurpose. It’s not a Valentine’s Day card, but you can use it to love yourself, someone else, as the very simple expression of gratitude for this person you’re lucky to land with on the universe. You can’t choose your family, but she was the absolute best, and I’m so grateful I got to be … get to be … her brother.”
The beauty and liberated spirit of “Thee Black Boltz” is exemplified in how diverse the musicality and lyrical themes are. It is, exactly as Adebimpe suggested, akin to a mixtape that acts as a time capsule for a portentous period for an individual as much as the collective. Where should listeners begin?
Adebimpe says, “All the songs are so different, but if you were to make your way in, I really like ‘Somebody New.’ It was a mash-up of two different things we were working on individually — me and [producer Wilder Zoby]. I came into the studio while we were working on a job — writing a soundtrack for a kids’ TV show [“City Island” on PBS] — and he was working on this synth thing and I said, ‘We should keep that for us.’ Then, on a whim, we sewed it together with something I’d been messing with, and while it’s changed melodically, it’s a good dance track. It’s a power-up; you can take it with you.”
Now that it’s out there, he says, “I feel great about it. There were a lot of breaks in between working to finish it, but now it’s done, I am really glad people are going to get to hear it. I feel like both [Zoby], I and Jahphet [Landis] have just been with it so long that any sort of nervousness or anxiety or uncertainty about what it is has kind of faded away. It feels like being in high school and a friend giving you a mixtape and saying, ‘This has a whole bunch of weird s— on it, I made it for you, and I hope that you’re into it!’ That’s exactly how I feel about this record.”
This story originally appeared on LA Times
