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 bandmate Dave Sitek (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.
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.
