TV on the Radio interview: 'We never wanted to be obscure'

ONE DAY IN JULY, A BULLDOZER mistakenly ploughed into the wall of Dave Sitek's Headgear recording studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It's the studio where the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Liars and Sitek's own band, TV on the Radio, made albums that have drawn international attention to Brooklyn rock.

Those were the indie days, when TV on the Radio were passing out home-made discs at cafes, and band members squeezed bits of recording time between hours spent at day jobs. Over the past five years, TV on the Radio have made their way steadily up the circuit, from independent to major label, from local clubs to international tours, while their music has grown ever more ambitious. Those ambitions are bohemian ones: packing a world of ideas into each song while ignoring both commercial imperatives and ingrown hipster cachet.

Tunde Adebimpe, the singer who started TV on the Radio with Sitek, unabashedly describes their music as art. When the band moved from the indie Touch & Go label to Interscope Records, the contract stipulated that "there would be no involvement from the label on the creative end". As the record business loses its ability to create blockbusters, the band's approach looks like a practical survival strategy.

In September, TV on the Radio followed their widely praised 2006 album, Return to Cookie Mountain, with a magnificent third album, Dear Science, (the comma is part of the title). The songs are vertiginous, full of cantilevered rhythms and synthetic sounds, yet openly catchy. Adebimpe and Kyp Malone sing about war and technology, environmental damage and racism, while also invoking pleasure and hope.

The songs are pensive but ultimately joyful. The album starts with Halfway Home, an elegy tucked behind a peppy, nonsense-syllable chorus, and it ends with Lover's Day, a celebration of sex: "Yes of course there are miracles/Under your sighs and moans."

Often a song starts with stark, kinetic drumbeats, only to thicken and evolve with layer upon layer of counterpoint. The band's sound is "representative of the human experience", Sitek says. "You have your first introduction to sound and hearing, and then you learn a language and then you learn to confuse yourself with that language, and then you're left with this euphoric, slap-happy, I'll call it ageing twilight consciousness where you're just befuddled at the human experience and all of the things you've accumulated with no direct guideposts or instruction manual."

In an era of disposable downloads and ring tones Dear Science, is a coherent collection of songs made for repeated listening. "If you're going to reach for it, reach all the way for it," Sitek says. "Albums like Purple Rain and Thriller and those kind of records, you had to reach far above the din of cynicism and modern living to get to that place, against all the odds. The industry used to support that kind of record-making, and just because the marketplace of the industry doesn't support it now doesn't mean you shouldn't still try for it."

But the album was made on a local scale: in Sitek's studio, with a horn section borrowed from the steady-gigging, Brooklyn Afrobeat band Antibalas. "I think the album as a format is dying," Sitek says. "To do an album of this magnitude, just in terms of the sheer number of things that had to be done, the musicians involved and the studio hours spent – if we didn't have my studio, who knows? We could have been really in debt for the rest of our entire beings."

TV on the Radio have held on to the experimental spirit of what was briefly, before landlords and tourists noticed, a neighbourhood of low rents and high creative density. "You could go out on a Saturday night and go to eight different places and see eight different bands, and they would all be interesting – really interesting," Adebimpe says. There was a feeling, he adds, that "I have to keep making stuff that I like so I can keep hanging out with my friends who make stuff that I like".

Back in 1997, Adebimpe – at the time a film-maker doing stop-motion animation, with a day job at Film Forum – and Sitek found themselves as roommates in a Williamsburg loft, which led to a musical partnership. "It just became apparent very quickly that we were going to be friends," Adebimpe recalls, "because his room was full of all this musical equipment with nothing but a mattress, and my room was full of paints and video equipment and nothing but a mattress." Soon they took on collaborators: Malone on guitar and vocals, Jaleel Bunton on drums and Gerard Smith on bass.

"We bullied everyone else into the band because we didn't want to go through it alone," says Sitek, whose main instrument is guitar. All the band members are now in their early thirties.

The four-inch dent in the studio wall is the latest iteration of what's already an old story: the continuing gentrification of Williamsburg. The members of TV on the Radio all still live in the neighborhood, watching bodegas being replaced by fancy restaurants and boutiques. In one song on the new album, Dancing Choose, Adebimpe sings at near-rap speed:

Angry young mannequin

American apparently

Still to the rhythm

Better get to the back of me

Can't stand the vision.

A high-rise apartment building is going up next door to Sitek's studio – actually two studios, since Stay Gold, where TV on the Radio made Dear Science, is in the rooms next to Headgear. "They build one skyscraper, and skyscrapers get lonely," Sitek says, in his three-pack-a-day rasp, lighting up in the alley alongside his favourite Williamsburg club, Zebulon. "So then they call their friends and more skyscrapers come, and they throw a party. And the next thing you know there's a skyscraper blogging about the skyscraper scene in Williamsburg."

Early on, TV on the Radio benefited from the talent-spotting and reputation-building of the indie-rock blogosphere. But eventually, the band felt typecast. "I'm done with cool," Malone says. "I've been done with cool for years."

Sitek adds: "We always wanted to reach a lot of people. We never wanted to be obscure. I think it was just hard for us to get a handle on how to make the kind of music we make and how to describe it. And it started to be misunderstood that we were trying to do some kind of weird art-house-rock obscure thing. But that's not it at all.

"In our minds, these songs are that simple. We needed to get a lot of stuff out of our system, but it wasn't in opposition to something. We weren't like: we want to make this giant complicated thing. It's just we had five different people with completely different perspectives, trying to make all of our ideas fit into one thing."

Dear Science, is both an extension and a turnabout of TV on the Radio's past work. Nervous energy and apocalyptic scenarios filled the band's 2003 EP, Young Liars (Touch & Go), and their first two albums, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes (Touch & Go) in 2004 and Return to Cookie Mountain (Interscope) in 2006. The songs on those albums contemplated the aftermath of 9/11, the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina. The lyrics were surreal and allusive, arriving in dense, art-rock productions that melded looped drumbeats, doo-wop vocal harmonies, atmospheric noise, guitar dissonance and improbable pop hooks.

"I like pop music," Malone says. "I also like the sound of a dying refrigerator. I can listen to that for an hour and a half if I'm in the mood."

There's still a deep streak of dread on the new album. Its title, Dear Science, includes the comma because it was the salutation of a letter Sitek posted on the studio wall while the band were working on the album. Adebimpe says it was written "in a kind of kid's handwriting on yellow notebook paper". The letter was addressed to Science itself, demanding that it "fix all the things you're talking about" or shut up.

But through much of the album there's a counterpoint of hope. "It's hard to tour the apocalypse," Adebimpe says. "For me, the point of songs, the point of getting that stuff out, is getting it out and trying to put it in a place so it's not eating you alive."

For this album, Sitek says, "I didn't want anything to be misunderstood, and I didn't want anything to be cloudy in an unintended way". He continues: "We were unpeeling these layers between us and what we thought was absolutely stunning and beautiful, and not so depressing this time."

Though the album has angry moments, much of the music tilts toward major chords and willfully upbeat choruses. "The age of miracles, the age of sound," the song Golden Age insists, over a beat that echoes the heyday of Michael Jackson, "Well there's a Golden Age comin' round".

Malone, the song's main writer, says: "I'm starting to realise that I don't want to just write jeremiads, even though the times kind of call for them. With Golden Age, I was trying consciously to create a utopian world inside a pop song. I don't think that three minutes of music on a commercial record is going to bring paradise, but I feel like there is power in music and power in our words and power in what we put out into the world."

After his interview, Adebimpe walks, with a visitor, past Stay Gold studios, and bumps into Brian Chase, the drummer of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who are finishing an album there with Sitek producing. Could Adebimpe drop by later and overdub some whistling on a song? Sure he could. For a moment Williamsburg seems like a bohemian neighbourhood again.

• TV on the Radio play the ABC, Glasgow, on 16 November. Tel: [phone] for tickets.