Lately, Tunde Adebimpe’s been thinking a lot about mixtapes. “They’re pretty much how I got into music, these mixtapes full of lots of different kinds of music that my friends would give me,” the TV On The Radio singer says. “And when this record started coming together, it felt like a mixtape.”
Adebimpe’s referring to Thee Black Boltz, his debut solo album. Written and recorded during TV On The Radio’s hiatus (which ended last year with a series of reunion shows, and suggestions that new music is on the horizon), Thee Black Boltz is an effortlessly eclectic, ambitious, often pop-curious and occasionally soul-baring set that draws upon Adebimpe’s wild and varied slate of influences. “I have a very hard time making the same thing twice,” he acknowledges, referring to the album’s restless creative impulses. “I’m not content to find my version of Warhol’s soup can and run off endless copies of it. When I was younger, people would ask me, ‘When are you gonna settle on a style?’ And I couldn’t. I like looking at different things, taking in different ideas and styles and making them my own. Maybe my style is a bunch of different things sewn together?”
Operating as a solo artist has been a liberating and unfamiliar experience for Adebimpe, after many years working alongside his TV On The Radio brethren. The group temporarily called time on operations in 2019, having decided “if we want to keep on liking each other, we have to get the fuck away from each other,” Adebimpe grins. Sessions for Thee Black Boltz began falteringly just before the pandemic set in, and restarted after the sudden death of Adebimpe’s younger sister in 2021, when he returned to his idle notebook as a means of combating the steep depression that accompanied his grief. “It was partially to process these feelings and emotions,” he says, “and partly to have a place I could go – like, somewhere I had to show up every day.”
When he felt ready, Adebimpe reached out to his friend, producer and musician Wilder Zoby, to make his initial sketches into what became Thee Black Boltz. “I love the committee that is TV On the Radio that has made all these songs I love,” he says. “They’re my family. But it was fun to have a committee of two people this time – Wilder and myself – to decide on every idea, ‘Does that work?’, and to give ourselves a finite timer on things to come to a conclusion. There was so much on the record that I was unsure of, and I really embraced that.” The album, he says, reflects a turbulent period he’s glad to see the end of, and to have learned his lessons from. “A lot of things happened; a lot of good things, and a lot of not-so-good things. And this album is like a series of paintings that accurately captures that period, this sculpture from the blueprint I’d written in my notebook.”
Choosing his baker’s dozen for this piece, meanwhile, saw Adebimpe return to the formative works that shaped him as an artist, and embrace again that mixtape-making mindset that had governed his early development. “When I was younger, these records expanded my ideas of what music could be, the permutations of what music could be, and made me want to make music and be part of the different worlds they would take me to,” he says, adding, with a laugh: “I can hear on my record now everything I stole from these records.”
Tunde Adebimpe‘s debut solo album Thee Black Boltz is out now via Sub Pop. To begin reading his Baker’s Dozen, click ‘First Selection’ below
