TV on the Radio: Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes (2LP) [TOUCH & GO]

Why you'll love it

This Touch and Go 2LP set adds "You Could Be Love" and finishes with an etched fourth side. The album won the 2004 Shortlist Music Prize and is in 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

This edition

• 2LP set
• Etched side D
• Vinyl bonus track "You Could Be Love"

About the album

Brooklyn in the early 2000s had no shortage of bands in tight jeans, but none of them sounded like this: doo-wop harmonies, saxophones, drum machines and great walls of fuzz, all fed through Dave Sitek's studio, Headgear, where the album was recorded. Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone sang over the top, and the result was TV on the Radio's first full-length.

Sitek produced, and the record moves from grand to intimate without warning. "The Wrong Way" opens with a honking horn line and a sermon of a vocal, "Dreams" drifts, "King Eternal" and "Ambulance" lean on those close, barbershop-style harmonies, and "Wear You Out" stretches out past seven minutes. On vinyl, "Staring at the Sun," the single with its stomping, hand-clapped groove, moves to side three alongside the extra track "You Could Be Love."

It has sold well over 100,000 copies in the US, and the band went on to become one of the defining acts of their era. The fourth side is an etching rather than music, which is the closest TV on the Radio ever came to leaving you in silence.

Also at Kops: more TV on the Radio on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On Touch and Go (cat# tg254), a reissue of the 2004 album.