TV On The Radio's Tunde Adebimpe on debut solo album 'Thee Black Boltz' • Interview • DIY Magazine

Tunde Adebimpe believes in the power of music; that, at its best, a song can be a spell – “an incantation to bring things into your life or something to break a hex with”. Over the last decade, he’s not been casting a lot of them. Best known as frontman of New York ‘00s indie trailblazers TV On The Radio, the band’s last record was 2014’s ‘Seeds’ while, in the interim, Adebimpe has been spending more time on screens than on the airwaves, landing acting roles in Hollywood blockbusters including Spider-Man: Homecoming and this year’s Twisters. However, since casually beginning work on what he thought might become his first solo record back in 2019, life threw a series of hurdles in his way that demanded some extra magic to pull him through.

“I had a lot of family losses in that time. My sister who is my closest friend passed away while I was writing this record, so the process of making it was like building an island that I could go to and be in control of this one thing when I couldn’t control anything else that was happening,” he explains, speaking from his home studio garage in Los Angeles. “It was like building a shrine to her and people who’ve passed away in my life to just say, ‘Thank you, I love you’.”

Writing with longtime friend Wilder Zoby (himself, a frequent Run The Jewels collaborator), Adebimpe describes the process – despite the sadness surrounding it – as open and playful. “It’s like being in a new city where you’re like, ‘I can do whatever I want because it’s not a worn path yet’,” he suggests. The first public step down that path, meanwhile, came in October with the air-punching forward-motion of ‘Magnetic’: a track that could sit alongside TVOTR’s most potent, and whose rallying cries, written from the middle of grief, gained a new layer of perspective upon their release shortly after the US election result.

“‘Magnetic’ is a symbol for bringing things together to be able to get a 3D view of it; that you’re the one that has the power to change these things. If you have a working map of the chaos in your head, you know the parts that you need to take care of and the bits you need to get rid of,” Adebimpe says. “One of the first lines of the song goes, ‘In the age of tenderness and rage’ [which was taken from] a photo of a young woman holding a sign at a protest saying, ‘This is the age of rage and tenderness’. And that just landed because that’s exactly what this is.”

“It was liberating to just go back to the ground floor and think: nobody cares about this except for me.”

The album – entitled ‘Thee Black Boltz’, and set for release this Spring – will come via legendary indie label Sub Pop: a fit that makes total sense but that, laughs Adebimpe, was a long time in the making. “I had a bunch of demos in 2019 and decided to shop them around and see who might be interested in putting them out aaaaand nobody wanted to do it,” he snorts. “I definitely had a big moment of, ‘Ohhhh right! All of that cultural capital I thought I’d amassed in the early 2000s, maybe that’s just… done!’ So I felt like I was at square one in some ways but that was fucking great because it’s liberating to just go back to the ground floor and think: nobody cares about this except for me.”

Now finished and fine-tuned, however, undoubtedly a legion of fans old and new will care about Adebimpe’s return. Not only is he sitting on a solo debut that sparkles with the vibrancy that’s always infused his work, TV On The Radio are also back and on the road for the first time in half a decade. “For the time being”, he says, his focus is back on music. “I hope the record is inspiring and comforting to people,” he smiles of the forthcoming release. “And if it’s not, you can turn it off!”

‘Thee Black Boltz’ is out 18th April via Sub Pop Records.

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