ANAHEIM, Calif. — Singer Tunde Adebimpe says that when TV on the Radio decided to play its first shows in five years at the end of 2024, he and his bandmates were excited, if a bit apprehensive.

“From the inside, especially if you haven’t done it for a while, it’s just hard to tell,” he says of the uncertainty of taking the indie rock band on the road again. “Like, when we stopped for a second in 2019, was that the end of it? Was that the wrong thing to do?

“Because five years in internet time is like 80 years, you know?” Adebimpe says. “Maybe no one cares anymore.”

People definitely cared. The 11 shows scheduled in November and December, including three in Los Angeles, all sold out quickly, Adebimpe says.

Now TV on the Radio is set to play Just Like Heaven, the annual indie rock festival in Pasadena, on Saturday, May 10, followed by a run of more than 30 shows in North America and Europe this spring and summer.

“It was so great to go back out,” says Adebimpe, who in April also released his solo debut, “Thee Black Boltz.” “The shows were just kind of ecstatic. There was a loud rumbling of noise the entire show. … It just felt like a big party every single show. So that’s exciting.

“We’re back and doing it, and it feels good.”

Just Like Heaven focuses primarily on the indie rock scene of the late ’90s and ’00s. Vampire Weekend headlines this year, with a Rilo Kiley reunion and acts including Empire of the Sun, Bloc Party, Slowdive, Toro Y Moi and Unknown Mortal Orchestra among others set to play.

“It’s a little surreal in a way,” Adebimpe says of the history and connections many of the festival’s bands share. “Because it does kind of feel you’re looking into a high school yearbook and you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, we used to hang out,’ and ‘I know those guys. We ran into those guys on the road.’”

In addition to Adebimpe, TV on the Radio currently includes original members singer-guitarist Kyp Malone and multi-instrumentalist Jaleel Bunton. Guitarist-keyboardist Dave Sitek, who founded the group with Adebimple, is not currently playing live shows. Touring musicians drummer Japhet Landis, multi-instrumentalist Dave “Smoota” Smith, and bassist Jesske Hume round out the lineup.

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Adebimpe talked about the accidental origins of the band in Brooklyn in the late ’90s, the impact of the 9/11 terror attacks on indie bands like his, and how he finally decided to release a solo album now.

Q: So why did TV on the Radio take five years off the road?

A: Touring can be a pretty intense thing. I mean, we’re not in our 70s, but as you get older, and you have any semblance of a home life, you’ve got to choose. If you really love something and you start getting burnt out, you’re kind of like, ‘This used to inspire me and now it’s burning me out.’ Luckily, if you’re in a position to step away, it can be the best thing for it.

Then you realize what you liked about that. You realize what led to that burnout to avoid. And I think as you get older, hopefully you get smarter about what you can take the best from and what petty nonsense you can leave behind.

Everyone was really psyched to do it, which is always pleasant. And we’re better at it, you know, even taking a long break, you come back and just start playing.

Q: Let’s go back to the beginning of the band. How you and Dave Sitek came together, what the plan was at the start.

A: There was absolutely no plan at all, which was the best part of it, I think. I was living in this loft in Brooklyn. There were maybe 10 people there. When we first moved in, it was $100 a month, so I grabbed 10 of my friends and built drywall rooms. It was just like a shanty town indoors.

Do you know the band Antibalas? They lived at the loft because my best friend Martin Perna was the founder, so that took up about eight people. Then we had a party one night. This is like Williamsburg in 1996 or ’97, so it wasn’t fully gentrified. It was sort of a warehouse party and the next, our upstairs neighbor, who was a documentary filmmaker, and her roommate, who was a cellist, called the landlord and said everybody had to go.

Q: But you stayed?

A: The super was a friend of mine. He brought people in, and one of the people was Dave’s brother Jason, who I knew and was friendly with. But literally, I would stay in my room, and there’d be a new roommate out there all the time. I’d be like, “Do you live here? Are you just visiting?”

Dave moved from Austin, and there was an extra room in the loft. I don’t think I knew he was in there for maybe the first two weeks. Then one day I walked by his room, and the door was open, and it was just a bunch of tubes of paint, some canvases, a four-track tape recorder], bunches of tapes everywhere, a mattress on the floor, some packs of cigarettes.

The first thing I thought was just like, “Yeah, that kind of looks like my room.” So we painted together and sold paintings on the street in Soho when we weren’t working odd jobs, and just hung out and started making music together.

It wasn’t really a band thing; we just started making weirdo stuff. We put out a sort of mix CD of all things that we ended up calling “OK Calculator” as a kind of joke on [Radiohead’s][ “OK Computer.” Because we had money for a calculator, not a computer.

Q: How’d you make the move from the loft to playing live?

A: There was a bar around the corner called the Stinger. The owner was starting to do little acts and said, “You guys want to come over here? We know you have this CD-R thing.’ So we went over, and it was an improv thing every night, and a catastrophe every single night. But that was the beginning of, “Oh, this thing is TV on the Radio and it has a live element to it.”

Q: But eventually, you got better. When did it start to feel like a serious thing you were doing?

A: We’d done all these shows. The part I’m leaving out is that Sept. 11 happened, and then everybody quit their jobs, their odd jobs. People were like, “OK, we don’t know what’s going to happen; we don’t know if we’re going to die. We should probably die doing the thing we want to do the most.”

I think that sharpened up not just us, but a lot of bands and artists at the time. So everyone kind of got it together in that respect. We made the “Young Liars” EP at that time. That was just me and Dave. I think Kyp was on a song. But Brian Chase from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is playing drums on the whole thing, and Nick Zinner [also of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs] is playing guitar on “Staring At The Sun.”

Gerard [Smith, TVOTR’s original bassist and Jaleel joined the band after that. The EP made its way to Corey Rusk at Touch and Go and he signed us. As soon as you sign any sort of record deal, you owe somebody something. That’s when you really realize, like, “OK, we’re a band, and we’re doing this.”

Q: I want to ask you about “Thee Black Boltz,” your first solo album. You’ve always done side projects but why not a solo record until now?

A: Again, it wasn’t really a plan. The band took a break in 2019, and in addition to a bunch of other stuff I was doing to stay busy, I went looking for old hard drives for songs. It really was just something to do. Something that I default to doing whenever, you know. If I’m not making something or drawing or in some way being creative – it sounds like a weird way to put it, but just working – then everything gets very confusing for me.

I just went through those things and kept going. It was sort of with the idea that I don’t know when the band is going to do anything again, I want to see how far I can take these things. The pandemic hit pretty soon after that, so I had the time. And eventually it seemed like, “Oh, I’ve got enough here for a record.” It just seemed like a real logical thing to do.

Q: It’s interesting how these bits and pieces from many years came together for a record that sounds thematically unified.

A: There really wasn’t a plan as far as theme. I think it could be more defined by a vibe of, ‘This feels correct and this feels very awkward.’ And separating what feels correct, whether it’s sonically or lyrically or whatever, rhythmically, in one box. Everything that feels like it doesn’t kind of whittles itself out pretty easily.

Q: I do love all the squelchy synths on it.

A: The house synth was definitely well used.

Q: And also how it opens with the title track, which is a poem or a spoken word piece.

A: I thought it’d be nice to have something that introduced it, or was a gateway to whatever world we were about to head into as listeners. I like a good story, or some good weirdness. For me, that poem is kind of a GPS or a very vague Rosetta Stone for the entire record. I don’t know, I just like a good chapter heading.

I think it can add whatever springboard for someone’s imagination to go into something. I think it’s nice somebody that, even if it’s just disorienting, they’re just like, ‘Why is that there? What happened?”

Q: It catches your attention and you pay attention or listen a little more closely.

A: It’s tape-recorded, too. The record starts with a tape playing, which I realized after. I came back to just working on a four-track. I wrote a lot of the demos for the record on a four-track, which was kind of a full-circle thing.

And it’s nice to have a little tape, the sound of a tape starting and stopping, in this digital world. It still very much warms my heart.

Just Like Heaven

When: Saturday, May 10

Where: Parkside at the Rose Bowl, 1001 Rose Bowl Dr., Pasadena

How much: $250 for general admission, $460 for VIP, $700 for Clubhouse.

For more: See Justlikeheavenfest.com.

©2025 MediaNews Group, Inc. Visit ocregister.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.