TV on the Radio’s Guide to Pre-Gentrification Williamsburg

It’s Saturday evening in late October, and TV on the Radio are getting sprayed with a pungent blend of coconut and jojoba oils. “I just want you to try this,” says the shopkeeper at Soap Cherie, a bath and body store on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a half-block away from a Whole Foods, an Equinox, and branches of at least two major banks. Tunde Adebimpe, Kyp Malone, and Jaleel Bunton dutifully extend their palms toward the bespectacled man, who glows with a gregarious, RuPaul-like energy. They silently rub the oil into their hands and take a whiff. “You can use it in your hair, my friend,” the salesman suggests to Malone, who proceeds to work the concoction into his glorious Rip Van Winkle beard.

This pitch happens on the sidewalk in front of the store, where TVOTR are peering through the window with a mix of nostalgia and horror. With the band playing their first shows in five years this month, and with a 20th anniversary reissue of their debut album, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, out next week, they’re graciously guiding me on a tour of their old haunts. Or, more accurately, a tour of the locations where their old haunts used to be.

When they were coming together two decades ago, before much of Williamsburg turned into a gentrifier’s playground, Soap Cherie was a community hub called Verb Cafe. “This is ridiculous, because they used to sell pastries here, and now they sell soap that looks like pastries,” Adebimpe says, eyeing some inedible cupcakes. The first time Malone made music with Dave Sitek, who founded TVOTR alongside Adebimpe in 2001, was for a Verb Cafe song contest. Their composition was called “Baby, I Dig Your Magic,” and its first line was a question: “Is it lonely in your pants while you’re eating TV dinners?” “It was vulgar,” Adebimpe remembers with a laugh. They did not win the contest.

When they tell the Soap Cherie salesman about the space’s former life, and the great times they had there, he gets a little defensive. Then he looks down and says, “But we still have the same floor!” Malone, who once worked at Verb, concurs. “Yeah, you do,” he says. “I used to have to mop this floor.” For a moment, the two men bond over their shared hatred of those eternal wooden planks, and how things always get trapped in the crevices between them.

After a few minutes, with their hands amply spritzed, TVOTR walk away without stepping foot in the store. “I don’t particularly care for the smell,” Adebimpe says, sniffing his fingers. “It’s not a scent I feel comfortable coming home with!” He then raises his voice, mimicking a suspicious partner: “You reek of jojoba oils! Where have you been? Who is she?!”

In 2024, you could make the case that TV on the Radio are the coolest and most respectable band to come out of NYC’s 2000s rock boom. Think about it. They never made an unnecessary show of breaking up only to get back together. (For the record, founding member and producer Sitek won’t be on stage at the upcoming shows, though Adebimpe insists it’s not that deep: “He’s just not touring. Everyone does what’s healthiest for them at this point.”) They never started hating each other or making bad records. (When asked if they’re currently working on a new LP, which would be their first since 2014’s Seeds, Malone says, “We are not... yet. But I don’t think anyone is opposed to it.” Meanwhile, Adebimpe is prepping his debut solo album for release next year.) Their sound—a mix of funk, post-punk, Afrobeat, electronic, indie rock, and (why not) barbershop, given added dimension by the interplay between Adebimpe and Malone’s voices—is too unique to be copied and commodified into oblivion. And for better or worse, their lyrics about the perils of climate change, war, and Zionism are more pressing now than when they were originally recorded.

It doesn’t hurt that they still come off like the most interesting people in Brooklyn. Bunton, effortlessly cool, just turned 50 but looks 15 years younger in a bootleg Garfield T-shirt; Adebimpe, 49, with white stubble on his face and wearing tasteful shades of blue, is both earnest and goofily dramatic (he is also an actor, after all); the 51-year-old Malone is in a bucket hat and colorful pot-leaf tee, and his copious facial hair and deadpan affect make it seem like he’s been traipsing this Earth for centuries.

But the more things stay the same, the more they change. Our tour begins at 132 Havemeyer Street, in a nook of the neighborhood near the rumbling Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. This is where Adebimpe moved in 1997, after a girlfriend kicked him out of her apartment a few blocks away. “It used to be called the Havemeyer Halfway House for Cartoonists,” says the singer, who was a visual artist before he was a musician; he is now married to the French cartoonist Domitille Collardey and has lived in L.A. since 2012.

He took up residence on the third floor of the former cheesecake factory with a bunch of friends, who built out some drywall to divide the wide open space. There was no glass covering the windows, just a lot of plywood. It’s where he first met Sitek around 2000, and they were in this building on the morning of 9/11. “That’s when everybody collectively decided to work harder,” Adebimpe says, “because we were like, ‘Fuck it, the world is ending, we should just keep making shit.’” It’s where he and Sitek recorded TVOTR’s breakthrough 2003 EP, Young Liars. Adebimpe says the entire floor was around 2,600 square feet, and its 10 inhabitants paid $2,600 a month total. Since then, the space has been split up into about six separate apartments. One of those units, which measures around 550 square feet, now brings in nearly $5,000 a month on its own.

“Back then we were so broke, but it was doable,” says Bunton, who now lives in an industrial no-man’s land between Williamsburg and Bushwick. “Now it’s so insane that it doesn’t make any sense.”

We head around the corner and start walking west on Grand Street. “There’s James Murphy’s fancy-ass wine bar,” notes Malone with a tinge of contempt. “It was always destined to be here.”

Across the street is Twenty Sided, a lovably nerdy destination stuffed with board games. The shop’s owner, Lauren Bilanko, sees the band in the window and waves them inside. She’s a good friend who’s known them since the Verb Cafe days. As it happens, she’s in the middle of giving someone a reading using a divination card deck called Reverie—which features psychedelic watercolor paintings by none other than Kyp Malone, who still lives just around the corner. “Reveries are dream readings, thinking about how we can manifest our dreams and what we want to put into our futures,” Bilanko explains, showing off the cards. 

Later on, when I ask the band about the romanticization of the 2000s New York rock scene, as immortalized in the provocative oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom, Malone says, “Even with the loose conduct and drug abuse, it was much nerdier than it’s presented.” They draw a line in the sand between the Brooklyn bands like themselves and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Manhattanites like the Strokes. “They were just a bunch of more deluded, richer nerds,” Malone adds.

We head another block west to 241 Grand Street. In the early ’00s, it was home to a bar called The Stinger, but the building has long been abandoned. Now the whole thing is covered in wood and rusted metal, its facade resembling a beaten-up work of abstract art. 

“They sealed it up because it’s a hell mouth,” Malone jokes. “It was a debaucherous place,” Adebimpe adds, “scum and villainy.” There was a policy at The Stinger where patrons would get a free bottle of booze if they had sex on the bar, and Malone remembers a couple of people who tested it out. Meanwhile, Adebimpe will never forget walking into The Stinger bathroom to find someone pouring champagne down an asscrack over a dirty toilet. 

“They don't make ’em like that in Williamsburg anymore,” Bunton notes. “The Stinger was one of the few places in the neighborhood where there was an actual melding of cultures, with locals and implants, college art kids and Dominican and Puerto Rican kids. It was kinda great, but it got dark.”

The Stinger was also where TV on the Radio’s original lineup—Adebimpe, Sitek, and Sitek’s brother Jason—played their first shows. Their improvisational live experiments sometimes involved the group passing the mic to audience members to keep the show going. “We sucked!” Adebimpe admits. One gig got so dire that Jason Sitek quit the band mid-set. Bunton, who was in the crowd at some of those early Stinger shows, is more forgiving. “You took the brilliant-to-terrible ratio and changed it,” he tells Adebimpe. “It started 20 percent brilliant and 80 percent terrible, and the ratio just got better and better. It was madness.”

As we get to Williamsburg’s main drag, a fluorescent, hyper-capitalist explosion of luxury brands and anonymous chain stores, the band gets a little loopy. “This is the Apple Store,” notes Malone in his best faux-tour-guide voice, nodding to the glowing beacon of tech that opened in 2016. “We recorded three records in the stock room of the Apple Store,” Adebimpe riffs, inventing an alternate history. Bunton brings things back to Earth, remembering that the building actually used to be a great bagel shop, where seemingly all of the hard-working employees were straight out of juvenile detention. “But people don’t need good bagels,” Adebimpe deadpans. “People need good computers.”

We pass a Bank of America at 166 Berry Street that used to be an artisan metal shop where the band’s late bassist, Gerard Smith, who passed away in 2011, used to work. A rusted metal art piece that was once displayed outside that shop is now hung up on a wall in the bank’s vestibule. It’s meant to be a tribute to the building’s past but feels more akin to how plunderers once displayed the skulls of defeated foes as an act of defiance. When Adebimpe sees the remnant of the old metal shop near the bank’s entrance, he doubles over and loudly pretends to vomit on the sidewalk in disgust.

Around the corner is our final stop: a big white box of a J.Crew store at 234 Wythe Avenue. “That’s where the magic happened,” Bunton says. It used to house Headgear Recording, where TVOTR laid down the second half of Desperate Youth, as well as Sitek’s Stay Gold studio, where they made their two best albums, 2006’s Return to Cookie Mountain and 2008’s Dear Science. “We would have recorded vocals next to the womenswear,” Adebimpe notes, looking inside.

Stay Gold, which closed in 2009, was also where the band met David Bowie for the first time. The icon showed up to the squat brick building in New Balance sneakers and khakis (“super dad-core,” Adebimpe notes), and recorded background vocals for the Cookie Mountain track “Province” in 2005. “He was just very non-dramatic,” Bunton remembers. “Light and laid-back in a way that understands the frivolity and uselessness of pretension.”

As the only band member who still lives in Williamsburg, Malone has largely grown numb to the excess commercialization around him. “I’m over it now,” he shrugs. He remembers when, about a decade ago, people urged him to support a small local music venue that was closing down. “I was like, ‘I can’t care anymore,’” he says. “I don’t even remember the name of the venue.” 

Taking the longview, Malone recalls how, even when he moved to Brooklyn from San Francisco in 2000, he experienced severe sticker shock. “I felt apoplectic when I went to a cafe and they wanted $2.50 for an iced coffee. I was like, $2.50?!” Adebimpe finishes his bandmate’s thought: “For that much, what else does it do?!”

Looking back up at the J.Crew, Bunton gets reflective. “People were bitching about how expensive everything was back then, but an establishment didn’t have to have a big store like this to survive. They could have something reasonable,” he says. “Now there’s no way to live here unless you’re fully deepthroating capitalism.”

With that sadly vivid metaphor in mind, the band begins to disperse for the night. 

“I have to go wash my hands,” Bunton says.

“I let a total stranger slather me in jojoba oils,” Adebimpe adds, in slight disbelief.

Malone’s regret runs even deeper: “I put it on my face.”