Skip to main content
Coming off the road for its last album, though, the question looming over TVOTR was whether or not to go on. Soon after the release of 2011's Nine Types of Light, bassist Gerard Smith succumbed to lung cancer at age 36. The surviving members soldiered through the promotional cycle, but once the tour ended, they were just as likely to fade from existence as make another record.
"I don't think we were really thinking about the future," says Sitek over the phone from Los Angeles. "It's impossible for me to put it into words in any meaningful way. That subject is really complicated. But at the end of that tour, we didn't know what was going to happen. We were left to our volition to figure things out."
Three years later, TVOTR is touring again, in support of Seeds, its fifth album. How it rebounded from such a crushing personal tragedy remains a complicated subject for Sitek. He is still hesitant to discuss Smith's death and its impact on the band, and doesn't like to talk much about the group's internal process. (The only reason he agreed to this interview, he admits, was at the behest of Natasha Kmeto, the Portland electro-R&B singer he just signed to his imprint, Federal Prism; see below.) It goes back to the idea of "pursuing the question mark": He's big on leaving things to the listeners' imaginations.
But when it comes to Seeds, how it came together is just as much of a mystery to Sitek as anyone else. During its hiatus, TVOTR split from Interscope, its longtime label, so there was no one pushing the band members back into the studio. At some point, the rest of the band—singer Tunde Adebimpe, guitarist-vocalist Kyp Malone and drummer Jaleel Bunton—reconvened at Sitek's home in L.A. and started writing and recording, almost out of sheer, instinctual compulsion.
"We're creatures of intuition," Sitek says. "We'll start working on something, and if we feel like we're supposed to still work on something, we do. Then, when we get to eight or nine songs, we go, 'Oh, maybe there's a record here.' That's really what it was like with this last one, because we didn't have a label, so it was really left to us."
As one might expect, Seeds plays like an emotional exorcism. Adebimpe's first words, hollered over elliptical percussion and chanting on opener "Quartz," are "How much do I love you?," and many of the early songs are unambiguously about confronting loss and struggling to let go. "Could You," a pulsing psych-rocker sung by Malone, wonders if moving on is even possible, while on the zippy "Happy Idiot," Adebimpe confesses to numbing himself into blissful ignorance "to keep my mind off you." On the album's second half, ushered in with the rising-sun wash of "Ride," the mood begins to lift, along with the tempo: The power chords of "Winter" and the pop-punk bounce of "Lazerray" are worthy of the Ramones. By the concluding "Seeds," there's a sense of coming to terms with the heartbreak of the past, and a determination to start over. "Rain comes down like it always does," Adebimpe sings. "This time, I've got seeds on the ground."
What's unclear is how much of the album is actually about the band's grief over Smith; lyrically, it could just as easily be about the end of a romantic relationship. Good luck getting any clarity out of Sitek—he won't even comment on the sequencing. "If we really wanted to talk about the meaning of stuff, we'd probably be novelists, not musicians," he says. But even if he won't speak in specifics, Sitek acknowledges the album's concept of rebirth isn't just a poetic metaphor for psychic healing. With Seeds, TVOTR is "setting the scale back to zero," he says. It has a new label, a new sound and a new understanding of its bond as friends and creative partners, where even its arguments make them stronger.
"Any organization that has creative people, there's going to be some butting of heads, but now we realize that's an asset," he says. "It's like a rubber band. You pull it in all these different directions, and the moment it snaps back together is what the band is. That snap is how it all works.â
SEE IT: TV on the Radio plays Crystal Ballroom, 1332 W Burnside St., with Natasha Kmeto, on Thursday, Dec. 11. 8 pm. Sold out. All ages.
Dave Sitek on Natasha Kmeto:
âI heard her on satellite radio. I was listening to her, and the part in the song I thought was going to be the chorus, where all these other things would come in, she took everything out, and I thought that was the most modern decision Iâd heard in 20 years. I stopped my car, befriended her on Twitter, and as soon as she friended me, I direct messaged her and said, âWhatever it takes to help you, Iâll do it.â I might be dating myself, but I remember the first time I heard Sonic Youth. My first thought was, âHoly shit,â and my second thought was, âI canât wait to play this for my friends.â Natasha gave me the same feeling, and you donât really get that a whole lot. I was shocked she didnât have 150,000 listeners. How is this not the biggest thing right now? It takes a while to build something like that. TV on the Radio spent 10 years building, and is still building. With her, I canât imagine where sheâll be in three years, considering how blown away I am now. What will that turn into if she has the resources and the help?â
Natasha Kmeto's debut for Federal Prism Records, Inevitable, is due out in early 2015.
WWeek 2015