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Los Angeles Times
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Tunde Adebimpe explores ‘tenderness and rage' on debut solo album
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.' 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. 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. '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.'
The Guardian
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe: ‘I remember thinking I never want to do this again'
Sitting in the belly of north London's Islington Assembly Hall in the middle of four sold-out nights, TV on the Radio frontman Tunde Adebimpe is recalling the precise moment he wanted to quit his band – and music – for ever. It was 2019 and the group, an art-rock four-piece who haven't made a record that wasn't adored by critics since emerging from Brooklyn in the early 00s, were opening for Weezer and Pixies at Madison Square Garden in New York. Over the years, they've made five studio albums and also lost bass player Gerard Smith, who died suddenly in 2011. They've grieved and grown together. Adebimpe is their talisman. A tall, expressive focal point, able to rabble-rouse with songs such as Wolf Like Me, or calm the congregation with low-slung tracks such as DLZ or Young Liars. But by 2019, the ties that bound the band had begun to fray, due to a familiar mix of a demanding tour schedule and too much time living in each other's pockets. 'It should have been such a high point,' says Adebimpe of the Madison Square Garden gig. 'But I remember thinking: 'That was a good show, but I just never want to do this ever again.'' The malaise went further than one performance after a hard tour. 'There's a point where I had a very weird feeling of, like: 'I think I'm done,'' he says, a few flecks of white in his beard giving away the fact he's about to turn 50. 'I think I'm just done listening to music. I don't give a fuck about bands. I just want silence … as much as I can get it.' Adebimpe pressing pause seems about as likely as Donald Trump staying silent. Over the past 25 years, he has become one of the world's most successful creative chameleons. The son of middle-class Nigerians who moved between St Louis, Pittsburgh and Lagos during his childhood, Adebimpe is able to oscillate between hyperbolic indie frontman, actor and visual art practitioner (he once worked as an animator on MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch). He and TV on the Radio emerged in the aftermath of 9/11, in pre-gentrification Williamsburg, New York. Adebimpe lived in a loft offered to him by a friend. 'He brings me to the third floor of this place, and it's just, like, plywood on the windows and it's freezing cold,' he recalls. 'Just imagine a gigantic empty floor at the very end of it, there's a lightbulb, a toilet and a sink, but you can see all of the pipes … going into the ground. And he's like: 'Yeah, we're still working on it.'' The upside was the rent, $100 a month, which gave Adebimpe the space to work on the nascent version of TV on the Radio with guitarist Kyp Malone (they left copies of 2002's OK Calculator, their ultra-rare debut CD, in Williamsburg coffee shops). But music wasn't Adebimpe's only pursuit. He also tried acting while at university and he has recently carved out a third career in film. On screen, he has proved incredibly versatile, able to handle the arthouse demands of being a lead in Sebastián Silva's Nasty Baby and also deliver tender performances in Disney+ Star Wars spin-off Skeleton Crew and weather disaster sequel Twisters. The Hollywood moments have transformed the way his young daughter Echo (Adebimpe is married to French cartoonist Domitille Collardey) sees him. He's gone from 'dad who potters around in the garage with music and puppets' to a movie star. 'There was a premiere for the first Skeleton Crew episode at Disneyland, and she was sitting next to me the whole time hitting me, just like: 'You're in this, daddy,'' he says, mimicking her shock and awe. 'I was like … 'I know.'' Today, we're here to talk about his latest transformation, into a solo musician; a move that came after TV on the Radio's mini-implosion. After the tour, he implemented a music ban. Then weeks passed. Slowly, Adebimpe, who'd thrown himself into making art, started to feel the musical urge. 'It's like a patch of weeds that you clip,' he says. 'Things grow back, and thoughts grow back, and you hear melodies. I started having fun again, I was really trying to go back to zero.' After the hard reset, Adebimpe disappeared into his garage in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. He began to play with old demos. Mostly using simple drum machines and a couple of synths, he started crafting what would become the basis for his debut solo record, Thee Black Boltz. It sees Adebimpe and his co-producer, Wilder Zoby, the former frontman of Brooklyn indie-funk band Chin Chin, play with pop, hip-hop and glam rock, while snarling it all up with distortion and pounding drum patterns. If some of TV on the Radio's more expansive songwriting pushed the limits of what rock could be, Thee Black Boltz sees Adebimpe detach completely from the mothership and set off to coordinates unknown. It almost didn't happen. Adebimpe had been shopping around some demos in 2020 and got a lot of polite nos. 'I wasn't expecting that much, but it was a very humbling experience,' he said. 'Whatever cultural capital in the back of my head that I thought I, or we, might have amassed, didn't exist.' Then he changed tack and decided to approach labels that had inspired him growing up. Sub Pop, the home of Nirvana and Earth, bit his hand off. The album's lead single, the throbbing electropop of Magnetic, was a statement of intent but also a red herring. The record jumps between genres constantly. Ate the Moon and Blue aren't far off the industrial hammer blows of Nine Inch Nails; Pinstack has the swagger of glam; second single, Drop, is gentle pop underpinned with scuzzy beatboxing; while The Most combines pulsing stabs of synthesiser with a sample of dancehall classic Under Mi Sleng Teng. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion That might sound overwhelming, but it's all tied together with Adebimpe's voice – baritone and rich as ever – and lyrics that are nearly always about love, lost or otherwise. 'It feels like the kind of mixtape I would have given to somebody in high school and said: 'Here's a couple of my favourite bands,'' says Adebimpe. 'It all hangs together because the sentiment is: this is a gift for you.' One song that stands out is ILY, a soft ode dedicated to Adebimpe's younger sister, Jumoke, who died suddenly just as the Covid pandemic was nearing its end. She lived in Florida; his father had died and Adebimpe's mother had moved back to Nigeria, so the responsibility fell on him to make arrangements. 'I was the only family member, so I had to go down and essentially plan this funeral in the course of a week, call all of my relatives, put them on Zoom during this thing. I had to give the eulogy … in a mask,' he says, lowering his head. 'It was the worst possible thing.' The song became a way for Adebimpe to channel his grief. 'I had a sketch for it, and when we started writing the record, I found that again, and then finished it pretty quickly. I'm glad that had been floating around and I had a venue for those feelings, because your grief is proportional to the amount of love you have for this person who is, like …' he pauses. 'I mean, she's my best friend and I'm glad I had a place to put that.' The patch of weeds grew back, again. Thee Black Boltz is released via Sub Pop on 18 April.
