TV on the Radio’s second album, Return to Cookie Mountain, has its release delayed several times, as the group from Brooklyn tweaked it to make sure it was to the point where they were happy with it. It’s absolutely worth the wait: the album will undoubtedly feature highly come end-of-year highlights.

Recorded over the best part of three months, frontman Tunde Adebimpe, explains that TV on the Radio then spent about half of month going back and tweaking things in final mixing. It’s resulted in a fuller sound than their impressive debut Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes, with the indispensable crafter of sounds, Dave Sitek, going crazy in the studio. “He definitely locked himself up in the lab and sanded everything down and polished everything,” Tunde agrees. “It felt like he definitely went extra on it, and it felt like as a band too we spent so much time on the road after Desperate Youth... that when it came time to write the next record we were ready to make something after all that time of not being able to write on the road.”

With a bevy of ideas brewing throughout the course of their two years between releases, Tunde once again shared primary songwriting duties with fellow vocalist Kyp Malone. “We’ll usually write the lyrics for the song that we bring into the band; I think there’s one song on here that we both wrote lyrics collaboratively,” Tunde explains.

When it came time to making the record, Tunde explains that he scoured through a series of four-track recordings he’d experimented with, seeing if there was something really good in there. “And generally there’s not anything,” he says self-deprecatingly, “so I’ll start again and try to add more melodies, and usually the thing that will happen is that I’ll find something that I’m working on lyrically and that will dictate – that will find a home on some melody that I wrote a while ago. Or sometimes the songs just come out of nowhere all at once, and you’ll make a special effort not to answer your phone or do anything until you can get home and record it before it evaporates into thin air.”

It’s interesting that Tunde indicates that the songs are based off melody; from an outsider looking in, TV on the Radio seem like a band who write from a rhythmic platform more than a necessarily melodic one. “Usually it’s something that just gets stuck; it can be more rhythmic or more percussive,” he states. “The record is really a result of things that come out of nowhere and end up on the record.”

At the beginning it’s usually a free-for-all – for this record all five members of the band were writing songs in their studio. Gerrard Smith wrote about forty songs that were never used, while Dave would make hundreds and hundreds of beats. “That’s the more experimental part; we were all in the same place working on computers and noodling around, and then someone would come in and listen to what someone else had done and work on that and it would completely transform,” Tunde explains. “That happened on quite a few occasions; someone’s throwaway sketch turned into a full song. Then after that everyone keeps building on it and building on it. It’s a really nice way to work but it can make you totally crazy because you just don’t know what you’re doing, and largely that’s because we don’t know what we’re doing at all.”

TV on the Radio have also gained reputation as a socio-politically aware band; after Hurricane Katrina devastated areas of the United States, the band released the track “Drunk Die Emperor” to their myspace page in response. “I don’t feel a particular pressure to be more political than I am,” Tunde shrugs. “That being said, I also don’t understand how someone can live, especially in this country right now, and not be effected or upset by any of the major political events of the last five years. It’s so obvious and it’s so absolutely in everyone’s face, and the responsibility that I feel to myself and to my bandmates and to my friends is that if you see bullshit you should call it out, particularly if it’s some of the most ridiculous bullshit in the world and it’s making you wonder about the reality of there actually being a future that you’d enjoy living in.”

As such, songs like “I Was a Lover” and “Let the Devil In” certainly seem politically-charged. A band such as Living Things made a statement with their debut Ahead of the Lions, but it was more making a statement for themselves rather than as a statement about what’s going on. “I don’t know that band too well,” Tunde says cautiously, picking his words, but he would that TV on the Radio would not be seen to be doing the same, “because that’s not really the case amongst our band and group of friends. I feel, personally, that when world events or neighbourhood events become so obvious and intrusive to your imagination that you have to incorporate them into your imagination so that you’re still thinking and feeling like a human being. It’s not like you want to be the person who’s using any sort of tragedy for your own process at all, but you also don’t want to feel compelled to talk about things that were going wrong. We’re not waving and showing off, or saying ‘TV on the Radio says fuck the government! And buy this CD! And this candy bar, this fuck the government candy bar!’ – that’s obscene and ridiculous, and not what we’re doing.”

There are many more expectations on this album – whilst still on 4AD/Remote Control in Australia, TV on the Radio are now on a major label in the United States. Return to Cookie Mountain has begun its life with a huge wave of hype, getting great press (deservedly so), and greeted ecstatically by one and all. “My expectations are to make more of it,” Tunde says of the music, “and I feel that it’s too easy to get completely disappointed if you have more of that. You can take it a couple of different ways, but I’ve been told this is a highly anticipated record…for some reason.”

He explains that the reason for signing to a major was the usual suspects – greater distribution and a chance to take their music to the world; if TV on the Radio is going to be the band member’s full-time consideration then it must be treated as such, and the majors give them the best opportunity to do so. “The fact that we could make a record and it could end up in a store somewhere in Thailand is really exciting to me. It’s nice to have the means of someone who can make that easier for you, and so far it’s been a nice thing.”

TV on the Radio play the Splendour in the Grass Supertop on Saturday between 6-7pm. They also have additional dates whilst here:
Sunday July 23 – Hi-Fi Bar, Melbourne
Tuesday July 25th - Gaelic Theatre, Sydney