Welcome to Defector Music Club, where a number of our writers get together to dish about an album. Today, Giri Nathan, Patrick Redford, David Roth, and Lauren Theisen explore TV On The Radio's 2004 debut Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes.
Giri Nathan: My god, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes is 20 years old. And I think it was just now, composing this sentence, that I realized that “blood thirsty” was two words. What was everyone’s first encounter with this album?
I was 13, reliant on the collective wisdom of message boards, slowly becoming aware of Pitchfork as a thing, getting really into p2p software like Soulseek, which is how I got this one. This album was one of the first times I can recall being told by the critical apparatus that there was An Album Worth Paying Attention To. Which was sort of a fun experience as a lame kid who was not very skeptical of authority and liked following instructions. It was nice to be told what stuff was cool, even if it left me cold. I remember bouncing off this record at first—it was a lot more muted and thinky than most of what I listened to then—but it grew on me. That's except for one particular song, which I loved instantly and still do. And I loved their next two records a lot.
Patrick Redford: Mine was probably six or so months after their second album came out, which was just as I was getting into new music for the first time as a newly unstupid young teenager. I was a big “Wolf Like Me” person, which my total non-understanding of the lyrics didn’t interfere with at all, and if I recall correctly, my cool world history teacher told me that actually “Staring At The Sun” was the best song they ever had or will have written. I don’t think he was right, but he wasn’t far off.
David Roth: I know I bought the record, and I could probably narrow where I bought it down to three or so places that extremely no longer exist. But part of what I miss about that time—or anyway one of the many things about being young that I’m wistful about—is that I don’t really know how I discovered anything then. What we think of as the usual channels now mostly didn’t exist, and so I was finding out about stuff because my friends were playing it for me or telling me about it, or because I saw bands opening for other bands, or maybe because I read about them somewhere and just bought it on spec.
But I think of this record, and to a greater extent the Young Liars EP that preceded it, as being something that just kind of showed up in my consciousness as if it was airborne. I know my friend Josh played them for me first, and I remember the first time I heard Young Liars, and how strange and distinctive it was—how spare and ominous it was, mostly, and how it felt to listen to it in headphones walking around the city at night. I had a similar reaction to this record, listening to it again—it’s excellent, obviously, but as much as I remembered the songs and sequence, which was pretty well, I don’t have a distinctive memory of the first time I listened. It’s just been in there for a long time now.
Lauren Theisen: So I actually went into this one completely cold. Not unlike Giri's experience, Dear Science, TV On The Radio’s third record, is maybe the first piece of art that I remember knowing was “critically acclaimed.” After their performance on SNL, I bought that CD, and then I also I found it to be a little too thinky. Though I did go back to it for this and was pleasantly surprised that it was livelier than I remembered. (“Golden Age” in particular is a joyful tune.) I, of course, knew the flamethrower of a rock song that is “Wolf Like Me,” from their second record, but that was it!
Patrick: Something I kept wondering about and theorizing towards was what they were reacting to with this record. When DY, BTB came out in 2004, the Strokes had put out two albums, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were on the map, and Interpol was huge. Various people were meeting each other in the bathroom, is my point, yet this album does not really sound like any of that other post-9/11 New York stuff, particularly in its drumlessness. So I found myself impressed that their entry point was this album that’s part of this big wave of New York guitar music yet sounds pretty distinct from a lot of it, and while I have some quarter-baked theories here, I’d be curious to hear from you guys where you think this came from.
Lauren: The David Roth signal is up in the sky.
David: Well if I may turn this cafeteria chair around backward and sit down in it, groaning worryingly and with distressing audible knee sounds, and rap at you like a middle-aged educator for a minute … you’re totally right, it does sound very different. Obviously it was coming out of that ferment of meetings-in-the-bathroom, but none of those acts were doing doo-wop vocals, and they were much more explicitly concerned with connecting or posing in some kind of intentional way.
There were, in terms of sound but maybe more in terms of fashion, a lot of obvious antecedents/inspirations for the New York City acts that were big around then, and as a self-conscious suburban dork I remember having kind of unkind opinions about all of that—it felt studied, and it was studied, although getting my back up about that was also pretty studied—but one of the things that impressed me about TVOTR then and now is that I don’t really know where this shit is coming from at all. The aesthetics of the other bands coming up around then were like uniforms—you could look at the act onstage and get a sense of what they aspired to and were trying to convey—and TVOTR was different not just because they were black in a very white scene, but because they weren’t dressing up as anything.
And they don’t fit into any sort of familiar space sonically, either. I felt like I didn’t really know how to listen to these songs, and while I’ve listened to them enough times now that they’re familiar and as comfortable as they’re likely to get, the songs are also withholding and icy and weird. It’s all obviously commanding, and just on the most basic level Tunde Adebimpe is such an incredibly charismatic vocalist that I think the songs would be compelling for that reason, but there’s something to the refusal to plug all these parts together in the usual order that is wrong-footing, still, in a way that I find bracing. I imagine at the time that I probably wanted it to rock a little harder, though.
Lauren: I had that wanting-to-rock experience in the back half of this record a little, but I was so excited hearing the first chunk of songs for the first time. It corrected the problems I thought I heard in Dear Science, which is that they were a studio band crafting songs that intentionally impressed you as well-crafted songs. The first three tracks sound like a band that’s actually being a band—exchanging energy back and forth while they go on a journey together. It made me want to go to a live show and bask in that creation.
David: It is authentically a very moody and uneasy record, which is another interesting marker of it being 20 years old. The culture was not in a great place in 2004, to say the very least, and the coke-y hedonistic bombast of the scene at that moment is not really anywhere to find in this record; in place of that is this mostly muted but very urgent pulse of energy that sometimes flares up into moments of rude noise or beauty but mostly doesn’t. There’s a sense of wariness and worry running through the record that feels very of that moment as I experienced it—like authentically of that moment and not of the scene that prevailed at that time, which was in some ways kind of a flip or abstracted response to all that. It’s not an explicitly political record—“Bomb Yourselves” notwithstanding—but you can feel the awful, thwarted, brutal politics of the moment in it. It’s an anxious record.
Patrick: Yeah, there’s a real sense of menace here, lyrically but also musically, which was sort of present on their second, also embarrassingly named album and absent on their third, also embarrassingly named album and onward, that I enjoyed. It’s hard to schematize these as pop songs really, what with live drums being used on three songs and that anticoncussive, buzzy, thick bass haze that haunts the album like background radiation, though if you listen to the rest of their output (embarrassingly named and normally named), you can see the ways this formation could give way to something more earwormy.
Giri: It’s cool to turn on this record 20 years later and still get that sui generis feeling that everyone is describing. You can recognize some individual components here—doo-wop falsettos, drum machines, scuzzy bass, flutes and saxes—but combining them all in the same song, without warning? It sounds like music with no obvious antecedents and, as far as I can tell, not a ton of obvious descendants either. That menace that Patrick describes was my way into this record. I was and am looking for a hint of menace in most of the music that I listen to—probably this band played some role in deepening that preference. I especially really crave it in a band with a mandate this arty; to my ear it keeps things from getting too precious. Sort of like I’m not just trying to stimulate your intellect, I am also trying to hurt you and make you feel bad. And the Menacing Barbershop Quartet on “Ambulance” absolutely floored me at first listen. I didn’t know that particular adjective-noun combo was possible. It’s the song on this record that I’ve gone back to the most over the years, and a welcome corrective to the remarkably wack a cappella music I attended as a supportive friend during some of those years.
Lauren: Yeah Giri, I also need to talk about how “Ambulance” blew my mind. I had to listen to it like five times before I could get on with the rest of the album. (I will forever associate that specific feeling with hearing “The Ballad Of Big Nothing” on Either/Or for the first time.) The a capella rhythm certainly sets it apart, but then that vocal melody is also so heart-breakingly pretty. It’s a very straightforwardly emotional song wrapped in some cool technical choices, so I think it comes off as innovative but not valuable solely for that reason. It’s a neat delivery system for something kind of immortal.
David: I think the most distinctive thing about them, and this is on every record, is that there is one song that is so horny it is actually a little bit concerning. “Wear You Out” is basically the same emotional tenor as Barry White’s “Love Serenade,” where you’re like, “The person singing this is maybe going to die of having a boner.” These are in my opinion reliably their best songs, or at least the ones I go back to listen to the most.
Patrick: I am not much of a lyrics person, but even so, the tumescence on display here was wild, especially given the anhedonia of the early Bush years. But even then, I’d rather have embarrassing passion than Julian Casablancas writing song after song called “Check Out My New Leather Jacket” or whatever happened to the Strokes after 2006. Also, I think it’s totally coherent to self-exsanguinate like that if you are as gifted a vocalist as Adebimpe is, and as capable of animating every syllable with pathos.
We, of course, picked this album because TVOTR has returned to touring, like so many of their cohort. I’m wondering, in the most general sense, how you think this album in particular and this mini-moment in general has aged. I reread both the original Pitchfork review and the new, much more laudatory one in anticipation of this Music Club, and I think the thesis they hinted towards but didn’t quite say is that this is one of the more original records to emerge from New York in the early aughts. I think Giri’s point about there being no true or obvious descendants here is a good one, and while I am not sure how much I am going to go back and listen to this over the next year, I can say I enjoyed my re-listen a lot more than I did with many of its contemporaries.
Giri: This is as much about me getting old as anything else, but when it comes to these sorts of artists—who recombine recognizable elements of disparate genres to get you somewhere radically new—I can’t help but feel that these guys were drawing on much sturdier traditions, like punk and jazz and art rock, than whatever contemporary acts are working with. Like it’s hard for me to get quite as excited about “we’re doing pop-punk vocals over trap beats” now, and I don't know that any of that will endure. I respect how clear TVOTR's vision was and how steeped they were in those influences, because it sounds like music that gestated for a long time before they decided to throw it into the world and see if anyone responded to it. And I think stuff like that is always going to age a little better than stuff that's tapping into a fleeting trend—everything moves so fast now. I think this stuff still sounds great.
David: I agree that it sounds great, which I pretty much expected, but I was startled at how new it still sounds. One of the many things that makes me feel old is hearing a band that’s trying to sound like Pavement or Dinosaur Jr. and realizing that the people copping those moves were basically zygotes when those acts were first doing their thing; I am going to live in hope that there are people listening to TV On The Radio now who will take the time necessary to do what this band did to get to the point where they could make records like this—keep listening to all kinds of music, pay attention to the stuff that startles or delights them in what they hear, and then try to find some way to reproduce that in their own way and in their own voice. This is the only way we ever get anything new, let alone anything that still sounds new after two decades of familiarity. I am pretty sure it won’t sound like this. If anything else was going to, it would’ve happened by now, and it sure hasn’t.
Defector's Favorite Jams Right Now
Tom Verlaine - Dreamtime
During a recent period of feeling bad, I came to a characteristically useless and unhelpful realization. My record collection was just making me feel worse, or anyway not making me feel better. My mood meant that every new artist I gave a hopeful spin sounded arch and weak and broadly not-for-me. I wanted, from the depths of that peevish stymied glumness, to hear something that sounded like what I like but which I also had not heard before. So I went on Discogs and bought some of Tom Verlaine’s solo CD’s for like $5 apiece. I wasn’t convinced that this would fix me, or any of the things that were bothering me, but it seemed a reasonable enough price for a futile gesture.
I revered Verlaine, who died in 2023, and still listen to Television’s two studio records with some regularity. That I hadn’t really gotten into his solo stuff was mostly a function of stubbornness—these were the sort of records that I’d grown up getting at used record stores, but there are fewer of those than there used to be and I spend much less time in them than I used to, which meant I had more or less figured out a way never to listen to stuff I was pretty sure I’d like. And as it turns out, I like 1981’s Dreamtime, Verlaine’s second solo record, quite a bit. There’s a lot of 1981 stuff going on with it—an endearingly high-flown essay from the German artist Jutta Koether in the liner notes, for one—but that was more or less what I was going for. I wanted the particular guitar tone and digressive-but-coherent song structure that I associate with Verlaine, and I got that plus acceptably loud-sounding production and a rhythm section that featured Television’s Fred Smith on bass and Rich Teeter of The Dictators on drums. It sounds more like a Television record than I’d dared hope, and pretty much like the impossible thing I’d sought in that grim moment of depressive browsing—a new record from a band that doesn’t exist anymore.
-David Roth
Matthew Sweet - "She Said She Said"
I've been listening lots to Matthew Sweet since hearing lousy news about his health, and while it's cliche for old dudes to tell youngers "Go listen to all of Girlfriend!" everybody should go listen to all of Girlfriend. But great as Sweet's own stuff surely is, his Beatles live cover of "She Said She Said" from more than 30 years ago was a boss rediscovery for me, and as I type this hits me harder than any Beatles live cover anywhere and just makes me happy as hell and leaves me wanting to drop everything and plug in a guitar as much as any song I've ever heard from anybody in my entire life.
Get well, Matthew!!
-Dave McKenna
Caribou - Honey
I was so prepared to roll my eyes at the new Caribou album. I've listened to and liked almost everything Dan Snaith has put out as Caribou and Daphni—two decades worth of playful, expertly crafted music with the former that defies categorization and three dancier albums with the latter (they aren't as good, but the highs are high). The common thread to Snaith's work is a cultivated, highly refined spareness that never feels empty. His most popular song as Caribou, "Odessa," works not just because every sound and drum is perfectly calibrated, but also because he gives them all enough space to echo around each other, his crystalline vocals always enhancing, never taking center stage.
The new album, Honey, is the most straightforwardly pop-leaning album he's made by a pretty wide margin. One of the most striking trends among artists whose work I follow super closely over the past two years or so has been the pop turn by several of the century's most interesting electronic artists. Floating Points just followed up his spare, orchestral masterpiece Promises with a club record, Four Tet was (briefly, accidentally) a Coachella headliner, and now here's Snaith dropping Honey, which sounds like a Caribou song that started drinking protein shakes and lifting weights. The drops are burly, the bass thumps, and the clear heart of the song is in wordless, EDM bombast. That's fine, and the song is infinitely more nuanced than the Fred Again stuff that I think clearly paved the way for this mini-movement (if you can call it that). But it doesn't really have the special pop that distinguishes his past work. He also did all the vocals with some sort of bullshit AI enhancement thing, and then didn't do any press for the album. All of this had me pre-emptively annoyed.
And then I listened to the whole album and I loved it. The two lead singles, "Honey" and "Broke My Heart," open the album and furnish sonic motifs that Snaith returns to and flips throughout Honey. He is making the most danceable music of his career, but it's EDM made with the care and craft that one expects from him. The best song is "Over Now," which is the best Daft Punk song released since Alive 2007. This is what they should have been doing instead of pretending to discover disco and making the worst album of all time with Pharrell.
-Patrick Redford
Agriculture - "Relier"
For my heavy music needs, I'm way more drawn to hardcore than I am to metal, but I will occasionally come across a sort of precious, contemplative black metal band that scratches a certain brain itch. The band Agriculture describes itself as "ecstatic" and "inspired by the glory of the ocean," and while those might typically be turnoffs to me they are absolutely green flags where this particular subgenre is concerned. And I think, somehow, they actually deliver on those high-flown self-descriptors? To my ear there's a cleanness, bordering on outright happiness, cutting through the superficial brutality of the music. It's sort of like black metal about being on a really great hike. Of all the bands on the excellent Flenser label, they're my favorite, and this is my favorite song of theirs.
-Giri Nathan
Various Artists - TRANSA
For the TV On The Radio fans: There's a cover of "Wolf Like Me" on here! And that's only 1/46th of the action, as this just-released compilation from the organization Red Hot celebrates trans people with a sprawling, surprising, overwhelming collection of fresh tracks. Listening to TRANSA is like swimming in the ocean; you can just get lost in the middle of it, surrounded by inventive music on all sides. It feels so unconstrained in its ambition that it's a constant delight. You'll be listening through and maybe you'll be like "Oh! There's an Andre 3000 track," and then you'll be like "Oh! It's 26 minutes long." TRANSA keeps pushing the listener into experiences that they haven't yet realized they love. In its monumental scope, it manages to embody the limitless beauty of transness. It stands as a symbol of our creative power.
-Lauren Theisen
