Pitchfork

[Updated Friday, January 16th, 2004 03:00:00 Pitchfork Central Time]

TV On The Radio's debut LP, Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes, is scheduled to come out March 9th on Touch & Go. That date could theoretically move up, however, as the album has already been leaked to the Internet. The album contains nine tracks-- eight new songs and a slightly-shortened version of "Staring at the Sun" (from the band's Young Liars EP, which placed at #28 on our year-end list despite having only 25 minutes of music on it). Tracklist:

01 The Wrong Way
02 Staring at the Sun
03 Dreams
04 King Eternal
05 Ambulance
06 Poppy
07 Don't Love You
08 Bomb Yourself
09 Wear You Out

In the wake of the band's LP being leaked, we talked to TV On The Radio multi-instrumentalist and producer David Andrew Sitek about their first full record.

Pitchfork: At first we weren't sure if what leaked was the finished version of the album because the production was so different from that of Young Liars.

Sitek: The dry production was an active choice of ours (seeing as how we already covered the "soupy" territory on the EP). The soup still exists with some songs on the record, but for the most part, when we added Kyp's voice to the equation... we wanted the listener to be able to hear the combination of Kyp & Tunde, and hear the lyrics... it is a more vulnerable sound that we thought would be another way to hear us... you could break the songs apart easier and see them as they are written. This way we have the freedom to use fidelity as another influence/medium and it sets the stage for another turn for us later. From a production standpoint, I am equally as fascinated by the space around the music as I am the content.

Pitchfork: How did "Staring at the Sun" end up on the album?

Sitek: We decided to put "Staring at the Sun" on the LP because we think the song is kind of a midway point from where we were and where we were going, and we really want it to be heard and since we are sending out as many promos for this album as we sold of the EP, we thought it could get us (and Katrina [Ford]'s) bad ass voice to more people.

Pitchfork: The guest performances and the production of Young Liars (you call it "soupy," we called it "hyper-real") were two of its most praised facets. What's it like making a record without either of those elements? Are you more invested in the success or failure of the record now that it's just you guys?

Sitek: As far as standing by the success or failure of the record, I think it is pretty safe to say that none of us really expected to reach as many people as we have with the EP, and if we were to "fail" by most standards it would probably put us right where we would have expected the EP to put us in the first place. We "stand" by our position of making music we are interested in, no matter what the critical fallout might be. And we will inevitably have more friends/fidelities/mixups on future recordings... we were really concentrating on Kyp and Tunde and me on this record, and how to fit such different sounds together without "muddying" it up... I think we succeeded in bring the sound "as it was" to the LP.