Television and Radio |

Thanks for staying past the first song,” says TV on the Radio singer Tunde Adebimpe from the stage of the Institute for Contemporary Art in London. Adebimpe has reason to be a little nervous: Not only are TV on the Radio playing their first gig in four months, they’re also debuting songs from their new album, Return to Cookie Mountain, a collection of hypnotic, shape-shifting tunes that has already earned raves from their buddy David Bowie.

Despite some rough edges, the new songs take flight with Adebimpe’s supple, soulful croon soaring over guitar fuzz, synth washes and stutter-stepping grooves. On a gorgeous version of “Ambulance” (from their first LP), David Sitek, the band’s thirty-three-year-old producer-guitarist, lays down a lung-taxing beatbox routine; the crowd clamors for a second encore.

The London gig is another tiny triumph for these unlikely heroes, a group of erstwhile visual artists with a far-out sound that Smiths fans can love. Cookie Mountain alternately evokes My Bloody Valentine’s noisy dream pop and Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, with songs that effuse pastoral beauty as they take off into uncharted territory. “It’s not often I hear other bands that are from the same planet as us,” says Kyp Malone, 31, the band’s hirsute singer-guitarist.

Formed in Brooklyn in 2001 as a sort of dadaist recording project for Sitek and Adebimpe, TV on the Radio didn’t release their full-length debut, the even more sprawling Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, until 2004. But the album won the ’04 Shortlist Music Prize, and the band earned praise from artists as diverse as Morrissey, Mos Def and Trent Reznor. In February, they announced a deal with Interscope Records, which will release Cookie Mountain in June. The band also got some crucial help from Bowie, who appears on the shimmering slow-burner “Province.”

Bowie had been following TV on the Radio since 2003, when Sitek sold Bowie’s doorman a painting and passed along some of the band’s recordings. After surprising the group with an adulatory phone call, Bowie kept in touch with the band members, advising them on everything from how to deal with record executives to what to do with “Dry Drunk Emperor,” a Bush-bashing single that they recorded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. (They released the track online, per Bowie’s suggestion.) “They have a strong link with the great body of American poetry, especially Beat poetry,” Bowie says. “The sampling, multitracking and mashing identifies them as the spawn of a techno-industrial society. I love the new record. I play it about three times a week, which is, like, saturation level for me.”

Adebimpe, 31, spent his childhood in a Pittsburgh suburb and in Lagos, Nigeria, the son of a pharmacist mom and a psychiatrist dad (who died unexpectedly last November). A student of stop-motion animation at New York University’s film school, he moved into a large Brooklyn loft in 1997; it was there that he met Sitek, an aspiring producer and painter who specializes in what he calls “children’s art with adult themes — like matadors falling in love with bulls.” While Adebimpe worked as an illustrator for MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch, the pair collaborated with their buddies in the Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Sitek produced the band’s Machine EP, and Adebimpe directed a creepy stop-motion video — complete with a gratuitously abused Karen O doll — for the single “Pin.”

Around the same time, Adebimpe and Sitek made a series of messy four-track recordings and began playing shambolic live shows that regularly featured a doo-wop cover of Hall and Oates’ “Maneater.” In 2003, they enlisted Malone, and later added bassist Gerard Smith and drummer Jaleel Bunton, a lanky Kentuckian who had played in hip-hop bands. “It’s amazing how many people ask us if it feels weird to be black people playing rock music,” says Malone. “That’s the most absurd cultural amnesia you could imagine.”

When they’re not on the road, the members of TV on the Radio don’t exactly take it easy: Sitek is producing the new Massive Attack record, Malone takes portrait photographs, and Adebimpe has been discussing collaboration with indie rapper El-P and directing a series of short “commercials” for the band’s Web site that feature comedian David Cross.

Despite all this activity, the band seems genuinely unclear about where its recording career is leading — despite the fact that it is now part of the biggest record company in the world. “We’re constantly surprised,” Sitek says. “That’s the beautiful thing about this band: We can sustain our sense of wonder.”

The biggest TV on the Radio song of 2008 is, like many of the band’s songs, about romantic disappointment. The vocals are high-pitched and anguished, yet certain. Keyboards are played with slight imperfections that sound as if they were born of frustration. At the hook, the piece bursts alive with martial percussion, giving it an appealing bulk.

Whether Mr. West, the cool-hunting hip-hop superstar, had those Brooklyn art-rockers in mind when he recorded that song, the first single from his forthcoming fourth album, “808s & Heartbreaks,” isn’t known. And it’s possible that something from TV on the Radio’s third album, the recently released “Dear Science” (DGC/Interscope), might slither its way to pop acclaim.

But for now this band, which began a sold-out three-night stand at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple on Tuesday night, might be gaining more clout as an influence, a group revered by others, than as a success of its own. (The new album sold 34,000 copies in its first week, a small number, though still the band’s best showing to date.)

Maybe that’s because TV on the Radio often feels as if it’s looking, and playing, inward, demanding others to engage the group on its own terms. On Tuesday the band put on a serious-minded and intense show that was at times exuberant and at times overly studious.

But it never lacked for technical fluency. Tunde Adebimpe, the lead vocalist, was a dynamo. While the rest of the band largely remained still, he practically vibrated around the stage, his shuffling somehow rhythmic and awkward all at once. Visually and sonically, he was the band’s tension and its ecstasy — whistling and cooing at the outset of “Young Liars,” making his singing almost raplike on “Dancing Choose,” and crawling slowly and cleanly out of the band’s distortion on “Halfway Home.”

Kyp Malone handles most of the rest of the band’s vocals, his flat rasp a balance to Mr. Adebimpe’s spacey croon. On “Crying” he barked and howled, and on “Dreams” he sang glorious, punchy countermelodies while Mr. Adebimpe soared above him.

Given that it has two distinctive singers, it’s noteworthy that TV on the Radio prefers to envelop them in walls of noise: density is the calling card of this band, which also includes Dave Sitek, who produces the band’s music (as usual, he played the guitar generally with his back to the audience); Gerard Smith, who plays bass and keyboards; and the drummer Jaleel Bunton. (In places, the band was joined by a horn section: tenor and alto sax, trombone, trumpet.)

Few if any working rock bands have the rhythmic intelligence of TV on the Radio, and the interplay between Mr. Smith and Mr. Bunton was firm and vivid, especially on “Wolf Like Me,” on which they applied the brakes and brought the frenetic song to a slow melt. On “Satellite” Mr. Bunton played rapid-fire, brute-force patterns that shaped the rest of the song, forcing everyone else in line.

“Dear Science,” from which much of the show’s material was drawn, contains this band’s peppiest songs to date, including a handful of psychedelic disco-soul numbers (“Shout Me Out,” “Golden Age”) that didn’t quite translate here. And the moody “Love Dog” felt hollow and lagged a bit.

But the band shone on older songs. “The Wrong Way” marched with industrial skronk, and “A Method” was solemn, underpinned by Mr. Smith, whose melodies recalled a church organ, and Mr. Sitek, who furiously beat on timpani. The band closed with “Staring at the Sun,” the highlight of its first album and still among its best songs. Mr. Adebimpe’s falsetto vocals were improbably smooth. Mr. Smith’s bass gave the song thickness. And when Mr. Bunton burst through the thicket with his formidable drumming, it suggested a band in complete ownership of its sound, wherever it may roam.