David Sitek spoke to me on the phone from Stay Gold, the studio he built from scratch over the past two-and-a-half years. He was in the middle of a Beck remix-- "It's turning into a free jazz song," he laughed. "I have saxophone players and flute players in here." But we were talking about the project that christened the studio, Return to Cookie Mountain, the major label debut by the band that Sitek produces, plays in, and co-founded: TV on the Radio.

Sitek started the band in 2001 with singer Tunde Adebimpe. These days, it counts five members: Singer and guitarist Kyp Malone joined the band before their last album, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, and drummer Jaleel Bunton and bassist Gerard Smith are the latest recruits. One of the only blends of New York noise, beats, and soul that actually adds something to its influences, the five-piece has been called "Brooklyn's best band." But that tag might not apply anymore: not only does their new label deal give them a way out of cult indie status, but Sitek tells me his landlord is tripling the rent to try to drive out the nest of prestigious studios in his building and replace it with a high-rise. This is the cost of helping to hype a neighborhood, but Sitek sounds resigned: "It just means I'll go make somewhere in New Jersey cool."

Pitchfork: You guys recently signed to Interscope. Was that mainly a means to improve distribution and PR support?

David Sitek: Just to get the music heard by the most amount of people. We don't want to be hidden behind some shroud of secrecy. I don't think that TV on the Radio is some dark mysterious band that no one can know about. We write music because it's an immediate form of communication. We're able to put on record what's happening in our times, and we want that message to be heard by the most amount of people.

I make music to bring the dead to life for a couple minutes and then let it go. But when it gets out into the world, you have a very slim opportunity... You know how you read a magazine, and it's like all the music magazines have turned into Marie Claire? It's like "66 Hot New Bands With Hot New Looks," you know? It's new bands, new bands, new bands, new bands. They end up being marketed like laundry detergent. And we knew that this was going to happen, so we were like, "How do we reach the most people before the next TV on the Radio comes out?" [Laughs]

Ultimately, we weren't just writing to an indie rock audience. We're not really writing to any genre. We're writing to humanity.

Pitchfork: What kind of new audiences do you want to reach?

DS: I've just looked at it like, I didn't want to alienate anyone. And I think that being on Interscope, if a volunteer firefighter in Montana wants to check us out, it would be easier to get our record.

Pitchfork: You've definitely shown steady growth. You self-released your first disc, OK Calculator, and pretty much handed it out on the street?

DS: Yeah. And tucked it in furniture at furniture stores. Which has to be a riot, because we put them in some ugly shit. I can't imagine someone taking this Italian leather couch home and finding this record. The thing that's funny is, I've moved like three times in the past two years, and all my stuff's been stored at Gerard [Smith]'s parents' house, and I found 120 or 130 copies of OK Calculator that we thought we left at a club. So I have a hundred and something of these things. But I haven't figured out what to do with them yet.

Pitchfork: Raise money on eBay!

DS: I was thinking about that. There's an animal shelter near here called BARC shelter, and I was thinking about maybe giving them 60 of them and saying, "Hey dude, sell these on eBay." And then if I find another band [to produce] that I think is pretty cool I'll be like, "Hey, why don't you sell these on eBay, and then you can get some studio time." I want to find some cool use for them, and I have so many other things on the brain right now that it's like the last-- it's like, "What am I going to do with this crazy record about spackling Gina with my ejaculate?" Hasn't hit me yet.

Pitchfork: After OK Calculator, you guys signed to Touch and Go, made the Young Liars EP and Desperate Youth, and now you've got this album, and it seems like you picked the audience up as you went along. And last year you did the "Dry Drunk Emperor" song and you released it as a free download right away. It's impressive how quickly you could finish that song and get it out to the public.

DS: It's really funny, the strange chemistry in this band. We will either take six months to find the right kickdrum, or we'll write "Staring at the Sun" in two days [Laughs]. It's really bizarre. And that just happened to be something that we all felt very strongly about, and I had the basis of the music down, so it was very easy to build upon that idea. And we knew that we wanted to put it out immediately, and so we didn't want to slow it down with the architecture of the music business.

There was no better person to join us in that venture than Corey [Rusk, owner of Touch and Go]. That's the beauty of Touch and Go-- when Corey heard the song and read the lyrics, he was like, "Absolutely, I'll fucking put the code [on the site] myself." And so he sat up all night and wrote the code for it, got it up on the website, made the announcement for us.

Pitchfork: But do you think you'll have opportunites like that at Interscope? Or will it be a problem if, say, you want to give away music for free?

DS: I think that we're going to do things like that no matter what, and then we're just going to have to read the menu and see what the price for doing that was [Laughs]. It's like the legal system, "You can kill your wife, but it's going to cost this much." You know what I mean? If they say, "I don't think you should do that," I don't know that we'll listen.

Our primary responsibility as an artist, is to produce work in our lifetime. And if it's something that's sociopolitical and immediate and we feel really strongly about it, we're not going to wait until a release schedule, until a distributor says, "Okay, well, why don't you guys sing about World War II now? Because we're ready for it."

Pitchfork: Do you think Interscope will allow you to be flexible with your work? Or does the deal add more pressure and more expectations?

DS: I can't even speculate as to all the potential problems that could arise from our relationship. A lot of good things could come from it, and a lot of bad things could come from it. But I'm so surprised-- when the industry pulls some dumb shit like Sony with that encoding CD [the rootkit software uncovered last November], that was unthinkable to me. I never would have anticipated that. So I'm sure there's gonna be instances where it's like, "Hey, why don't you guys cut all your music in half and make two-minute songs about orange juice?" I'm sure that that day's coming. But I'm also sure they're going to be like, "Hey, that's the coolest thing, let's get it out for free."

Pitchfork: Was it hard to leave Touch and Go?

DS: Yes, it was. Definitely. It's not like we left like some crummy label that did a crummy job.

/ / /

Pitchfork: All the way through to Cookie Mountain, a lot of the songs you guys write and produce are built on loops and repetition.

DS: Well, I think it's kind of like life. Through the trauma of birth we're thrown into these repetitions, everything from our heartbeat to our routines, and I think it's identifiable. When you look at commercial music, it has created all these different jolts-- but if you look at a lot of the music that we listen to, and particularly Afrobeat and highlife and a lot of music from like Mali, it's based on repetition.

This guy named Fegun who played with Fela Kuti for a while was telling me about the hypnotic effect of music. He's like, "The most important drum in Afrobeat is not a drum, it's the hi-hat. Because it hypnotizes. And that's what people identify with. It syncs with their heartbeat."

And he said, "When you're grandstanding, there's no consciousness in your music." And that's why I'm allergic to guitar solos for the most part, because I just picture this guy with a leather sleeveless jacket playing a flying V in the air. I just think that the whole idea of repetition is more inviting.

Pitchfork: Your work has political themes, but you guys don't seem to make "message songs." They're more of a reflection of what's going on and how you respond to that.

DS: Yeah, there's other bands that are better at giving slogans, and I think that a lack of subtlety is the first sign of a civilization in decline. It just comes across as propaganda.

We're not trying to sway anybody's beliefs. We're just trying to get people to examine their own opinion about that subject. And it's very hard to do that. It's very hard to leave it open-ended, like, "What do you feel about global warming?" If we say, "Stop burning the fucking children," it's like, if they don't have children, you've eliminated them completely.

We are completely aware of our limitations as observers, as western observers, as "having two arms and two legs and the ability to move" observers. We lack a lot of perspective, and I think that it would be wildly irresponsible for us to tell people how to live their lives. We go through the same series of mistakes. We've had our driver's licenses confiscated. This is about us trying to identify with people.

Pitchfork: You've called the album "apocalyptic"-- so what's the net result? Does this stave off the apocalypse? Do we get together and figure out how to deal with the apocalypse?

DS: Well, I think that that's an important part of it. I'm trying not to make an official statement about it, but we need to recognize that despite what we think-- because [you think] you're special, you're an individual, whatever-- we need to view it as a species. We're now at the point where we really need to evaluate the survival of the species, and that will only happen if we work together. There are so many people in the world with so many different perspectives. But ultimately at the heart of it, they're people. And [we're saying], can we please recognize that [our] differences aren't going to help at all. If we can move together as a species, I think that there is a possibility that we can make the world a better place.

The goal of our band isn't to make the world a better place. It's just to be like, "Hey, we're all in this together. The golf course doesn't have a force field over it. Poison air will get to you, too."

Pitchfork: At the same time, even as you're reaching out to people, do you worry that for some listeners you may not be a band that clicks on the first listen?

DS: I can liken it to smoking. The first time you smoke a cigarette it's repulsive. I don't mean that our music is going to give you cancer, but there are all kinds of things that are difficult upon first glance. Your relationship to your parents, for instance. It seems one way, and then over time it changes, and then as the cat does jump into the cradle you realize that they're vying for your time. And I think that with our music it's kind of that way, too. Something as simple as, what does a song mean to you-- well, today it means this. But you know when you hear a song, and you've heard the song a million times and you've never identified with it, and then all of a sudden you hear the song right after you broke up with your girlfriend, right after you crashed your car, right after you got fired from Olive Garden, and you're like, "Oh my God, I never knew that this song was for me, and now it's for me!"

I think that TV on the Radio address enough subjects that you probably couldn't identify with all the songs at once, unless you're simultaneously going through a divorce, being at war, bleeding to death, eating too much sugar, having too much fun, you know what I mean? Hopefully it's as dynamic as a human life is. And I think that that was the only verbal agreement that we all made with each other about what our intent was.

/ / /

Pitchfork: How did the recording process for Cookie Mountain compare to making Desperate Youth?

DS: We just had far more resources in terms of having two studios, a bassist and a drummer, [and] three engineers.

It's really funny-- this band is dictated completely by, "What would happen if..." We try to make a Commodores song, and it just sounds... not like Commodores. We wind up starting something and then we'll tear it apart, and then overdub and overdub and overdub. We just keep adding and subtracting until the most essential parts stick. And then we just discard everything and rebuild the song from there.

Pitchfork: How did you fund it?

DS: Personally. We went into a massive amount of debt, to some really supportive people who knew what position we were in. I funded most of it with stuff that I made off of other production [work]. But there were other people helping with the shortfall who are not in the music business. Generally speaking, most of the help for bands doesn't come from the music business anyway.

Pitchfork: You probably know that Cookie Mountain leaked over the spring.

DS: Uh-huh.

Pitchfork: That version started with "Wolf Like Me". Was that ever a working playlist for the album, or did somebody screw it up when they ripped it and threw it on the internet?

DS: Someone screwed it up when they ripped it and threw it on the internet. We knew the tracklisting as the songs started coming together. We knew what each song was representative of, and we knew that if we were going to tell a big story that it should start with this part, and then it should go here, and then it should go here, and then it should go here. That was our intention, and when it got leaked it was all the wrong order, and everyone thought "Playhouses" was "Wolf Like Me".

Pitchfork: How did you feel when you heard that it leaked?

DS: I don't remember exactly what I said to Kyp [Malone], but it was along the lines of, "Hey, let's go get some pizza." [Laughs] I mean, what are you going to do? Unless they invent a time machine. Who knows what the consequences are? Most people we know have stolen music on their iPods. Most people you know do. So it's like, if people just keep taking music for free, and there's eventually no money in it, then will bands be around? You can carry that thing to its furthest end.

Pitchfork: That leaked version, which started with the single, definitely had a different feel to it. And "Wolf Like Me" seemed like an easier place to start than "I Was a Lover".

DS: When you left Young Liars you were left with "Mr. Grieves", this a capella thing, and your first thought is, "What the fuck is this band going to do next?" Hopefully. Then you get to Desperate Youth, which starts with "Wrong Way", and you're like, "Oh my God, this is going to be a weird trip." And then it ends with "Wear You Out", with that crazy mysticism, and then you're like, "Where will this band go from here?" And then we get to New Health Rock, which ends with "Modern Romance" and you're like, "What the fuck are they trying to do? Are they trying to half-ass every genre and ape every style they can?" And the answer is yes.

We knew that when you left off of "Dry Drunk Emperor", it was kind of like, "How do I handle knowing what they just told me?" And "I was a lover before this war" was kind of an announcement to say, "We would like to have the luxury to sing about something else. But we don't have that luxury. And so let's engage." I'm trying to not equate it to other works of art, but that John Gray book, Straw Dogs, talks about the world being overpopulated, and it has this undercurrent of, "It's okay, that's what species do, and we may have outlived our usefulness." And I think "I Was a Lover" hits on that mode.

We wanted to leave [the album] open to the possibility that we as a band may discover a new way. And I don't know that that necessarily follows with the last track, but definitely that's the trajectory of the record. It's sort of like, "Now that you know that we're all together, where do we go from here?" I hope that when people listen to Return to Cookie Mountain that they identify, that they don't feel alienated. I hope they feel like they are in the room with us, and we're not a band, and we're not separated by the lousy stigma of misappropriated attention. [Laughs]

Pitchfork: You're not up there taking the big guitar solo.

DS: Exactly. I'm not high-fiving in the sun in slow motion in a Mountain Dew commercial.

Pitchfork: Before Cookie Moutain came out, you posted some promotional videos on your website that were really funny. And what struck me is that people don't often think of you as a "funny" band.

DS: That's I think the biggest irony of this entire situation. You may or may not know this, but Tunde and I started this band by being drunk at a karaoke night, drinking Red Bull and vodka and making up our own words, and we would just turn off the music and I would beatbox and do the basslines, and he would just wing it. And Tunde's probably the funniest person ever in the universe. Our band is all based on humor. And it's just kind of like, how seriously can you take yourself?

People put this fog on our music that we don't put on it. People think that we wear monocles and take bubble baths and read The Great Gatsby, you know? Nothing could be further from the truth. Everyone in the band's got a very extremely funny sense of humor-- Tunde worked for "Celebrity Deathmatch," for Christ's sake. And anyone who's ever read anything I've ever said publicly knows I'm a fool. So, I guess if you're just listening to "Blind", you would totally take us very seriously.

And even within a song like "Dry Drunk Emperor", it's a very serious song, but the actual phrase-- "gold cross jock skull and bones"? That shit's hysterical! I thought that shit was a riot. I couldn't stop laughing. That's just fucking nail on the head.

Pitchfork: What are you guys working on next?

DS: We're just doing the tour thing, and we all write music constantly. I'm still working on the Massive Attack [collaboration]. I've got a couple of other secrets up my sleeve, but this winter I'll be devoting my entire every ounce of my being to Celebration's next record. And I'm sure everyone in our band is going to be on that record, as well as everyone we know. If you want to know who our musical family is, they'll probably all be on Celebration's next record. That's my prediction.