It was an extreme time; it was a normal time. In the weeks and months after the World Trade Center attacks, as the country’s mourning fermented and people became drunk with vengeance, TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe and David Andrew Sitek had to figure out how to return to work. “If we’re going to die,” Adebimpe told Lizzy Goodman years later, in Meet Me in the Bathroom, “we should probably just make a ton of shit that we like first.” By the time they released their debut album, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, in 2004, Adebimpe and Sitek—now joined by singer and guitarist Kyp Malone—had found a way to make the shit they liked. But they never forgot about dying.
Now reissued for its 20th anniversary with a collection of demos and singles, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes is an album in which extremes—of sound, of emotion, of thought—are tamed and normalized, even beautified, until their extremity becomes so routine you can take it for granted. Bass tones that rumble with the shake of an idling Harley are looped into terse quantized rhythms. Guitars that sound like synthesizers or distant drones swoop gracefully across the songs. Only three songs have live drums; the only cymbal is a hi-hat. Malone pushes his voice to the very top of his register and stays there, following Adebimpe’s lead vocals from above like a guardian angel. And Adebimpe, possessor of one of the greatest voices of his generation, sings with the urgency and desperation of someone who’d been asleep for a long time and has woken up to find his house on fire. William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, which came out around the same time, captured the feeling of horrible possibility that 9/11 made apparent: The world was bigger than we thought, and that was a tragedy. Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes is about what it feels like to live with this knowledge. “All your dreams are over now,” Adebimpe and Malone sing in “Dreams,” after warning, “But your heart can’t grieve.”
This dynamic, of trying to create joy and meaning in a hostile world, is something Adebimpe and Malone—as well as touring bassist Gerard Smith and drummer Jaleel Bunton, both of whom would soon become full-time members—would have to confront every time they stepped on stage as Black musicians in an overwhelmingly white scene. Desperate Youth opens on Adebimpe finding himself in “a magic n— movie” in “The Wrong Way,” where he reflects on the role that Black artists are so often forced to play: “Teaching folks the score/About patience, understanding, agape, babe/And sweet, sweet amour.”
The music behind him is tight and jarring, a heavy truck being thrown around a pitted road. There’s a slight echo on the drums, and an overwhelming amount of distortion on the bass, but the rhythm the instruments make together is like something from a Johnny Cash record, a thumping Tennessee Two beat. Saxophones harmonize and swing like they’re under the baton of Cab Calloway, occasionally passing through digital filters that seem to flatten their notes. “When I realized where I was, did I stand up and testify?” Adebimpe and Malone sing together in a gospel rave-up coated in sarcasm, “Or did I show off my soft shoe?/Maybe teach ’em a boogaloo?”
Even once it rounds into a triumph of self-definition, “The Wrong Way” is an inky, ugly, haunted portrait of American music history sung through painted-on smiles. It’s also very fun to dance to in a crowded club. That’s part of the point. TV on the Radio’s use of the N-word inserts space between the band and the non-Black portion of their fanbase, daring them to sing along, knowing that they won’t, and in doing so illustrating how often Black artists are called upon to transform their pain into entertainment; it’s a reminder that not everything has to be for everybody. Years later, Vince Staples would plainly spell out the entire phenomenon in “Lift Me Up”; Soul Glo do the same thing every time they play “Jump!! (Or Get Jumped!!!) ((by the future)).”
Despite—and because of—the heaviness of its context, Desperate Youth is an album rich with sensual pleasure, and occasionally explicit in its statement of desire. “Let me wear you out,” Adebimpe sings over a ribald church organ and smirk of sax in the original album’s final song. In “Poppy,” while the guitars color their Interpol riffs carefully between the lines of a mechanical drumbeat, Adebimpe and Malone’s vocals drift like dandelion fluff, practically unconscious of the song around them as they meditate on the mating habits of backyard blackbirds. “They were all fucking,” they sing, Malone floating up to a grace note that marks the fucking as divine. A couple of years later, they would turn their lust lupine and write one of the defining songs of an era that was otherwise remarkably chaste. On Desperate Youth, there’s no need for metaphor, and no attempt at any kind of amorous lesson-making. There’s only the singers’ own sexuality and their delight in it. “The mouth is open wide, the lover is inside,” Adebimpe sings in “Staring at the Sun,” while tremolo picking and a ticking hi-hat wind the song tight with sexual tension.
So much of TV on the Radio’s power was generated by the ways Adebimpe and Malone’s voices rubbed against one another. On later records, their vocal arrangements would grow in complexity, and the band’s production would loosen up to accommodate. Here, though, they often act as a sweet foil to the menace of the music around them. Rather than follow the sharpened scud of guitar that rips through “Dreams,” they sit back, Adebimpe singing like he’s sharing a campfire with old friends while Malone chases sparks. Their approach drags the song’s tension backward, pulling open enough space for the warm echoes of drum to resonate in a rich and inky atmosphere, something between Bauhaus and Adrian Sherwood. In “Ambulance,” the instruments retreat, ceding most of the space to tape hiss and no less than four different systems of vocal harmony, with a doo-wop rhythm bed, a gooey Beach Boys choir, and glitched samples all surrounding Adebimpe and Malone’s primary vocals.
Like so many studio rats before him, Sitek started a band in part to showcase his production chops; the hype-building Young Liars EP, which he and Adebimpe released in 2003, was primarily meant to be a brochure of his services. In addition to recording what felt at the time like half of the indie-rock bands in New York, Sitek would go on to work with everyone from Scarlet Johansson to Preservation Hall Jazz Band to Chelsea Wolfe, even picking up a production credit on Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s “LoveHappy.” You can hear snippets of ideas he’d use elsewhere make their debut on Desperate Youth: The microfoam of distortion that pulses through “Staring at the Sun” pops up a few years later in Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Heads Will Roll,” while the spaced-out funk of Kelis’ “Jerk Ribs” recalls the gothic dub of “Bomb Yourself.”
Sitek’s particular genius, though, is for creating mutually dependent contrasts between vocalists and the song around them, a kind of musical yin and yang. The homemade quality of the demos that accompany the reissue make this especially clear. “Bomb Your Country” appears in an early form as the sketch “Final Fantasy,” with Adebimpe and Malone harmonizing over a scratch track that’s little more than a kick drum and a synth that sounds like it wiggled its way off an Ohio Players record; Adebimpe accompanies himself via beatbox in the “Staring at the Sun” demo. In both cases, the vocals lack the bittersweet juice that flows through the album versions of the songs, even as the decluttered nature of the latter exposes the shadowed corners and turns in enunciation that give Adebimpe’s voice its character. On “New Health Rock,” a single released in October 2004 that marks the recording debut of what would become TV on the Radio’s classic lineup, Jaleel Bunton’s live drums benefit from the extra space in the production, and the constricted feeling of the album gives way to a casual, almost funky sound the band would perfect on 2008’s Dear Science.
When it was released, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes seemed to point to a new form of indie rock that could be sexy without being exploitative or trashy, spectral without being camp, and ready to meet the moment without being didactic. It suggested a new kind of maturity for music that was stuck in the space between the underground and the mainstream. If irony was indeed on its last breath, as everyone insisted in the early years of the 2000s, TV on the Radio showed that sincerity didn’t have to be a form of naivete but could be a clear-eyed way of navigating choppy waters. The spiritual weather in this country has barely changed in the years since; Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes has never sounded better.
