We feel TV on the Radio beat mastermind Dave Sitek's impulse to do his own thing, releasing a producer's album under the moniker Maximum Balloon with vocals by folks like Karen O, Theophilus London and Little Dragon. Still, there's nothing sweeter than the chemistry of old friends, and after years of playing together in TVOTR, singer Tunde Adibempe and Sitek mesh like they've never once been apart. In FADER 57, when we featured TVOTR on our cover prior to the release of 2008's Dear Science, Adebimpe told us, "We're always working on our own different stuff, so then everyone just kinda brings everything in and it's like, We'll take that one and that one and you keep fatty." Listening to their Maximum Balloon collabo, it's hard to imagine any one of their tracks being a throwaway—"Absence of Light" sounds as much a come-on as a manifesto, a swank, sexy and forward-thinking bedroom jam teleported straight from the place where one ponders existence. Now can we get a new TV on the Radio album?
Maximum Balloon - “Absence of Light” Feat. TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe by Some Kind of Awesome (via Stereogum)