SITEK: We all saw [the 1983 post-nuke movie] The Day After. I remember my guidance counselor talking to me about the future, and him arguing with me about making plans for the future and acting responsibly. I’m like, “All I hear is death, death, death, death, death. I’m not even going to make it to 18, so I’m not gonna waste any time thinking about it.” MALONE: I dunno. Life has proven to be a lot longer than I anticipated. SMI TH: There is a difference between the apocalyptic threat [in movies on TV] and dumb-ass leaders with nuclear weapons. A team of dragons are going to kill the world? Maybe not. That dumb-ass who’s trying to prove something to his dad? Maybe. SI TEK: It’s like Paul’s letter to the Galatians: You’re sitting on the roof waiting for God to come, and in the meantime, you should be tending to your field or whatever. [People say,] “Well, if we all band together...” That is a giant if. In fact, that if is made of ice, and it’s global warming, and I’m watching it melt down, and now it’s a dot in a little corner.

 

At this, everybody laughs. How could they not? Just when TV on the Radio are becoming one of the most beloved bands in the world, the world itself seems on the verge of a breakup.

As a certain Minneapolis butt-dancer famously sang: “Party over. Oops. Outta time.”

FOR ALL OF Dear Science’s prescience, much of it was written back when things were bad, but not yet that bad. In January, when the group members brought their individual demos into Sitek’s Stay Gold Studios in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—where Sitek recorded some of the upcoming Yeah Yeah Yeahs album—the economy had yet to collapse, the presidential campaigns were still free of McCarthy-esque demagoguery, and the bizarre trifecta of late-summer disturbances (Georgia, the credit implosion, David Foster Wallace) was still months away.

But Malone, 35, and Adebimpe, the group’s primary lyricists, had plenty of experiences to draw from. “Throughout the process of writing this

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record, I’ve been in love,” says Malone. This has happened before, he says, but this time, “I’m doing it without an expiration date in the back of my mind. And that hasn’t happened in a really long time.”

It’s a few days after the Minneapolis gig, and we’re having a late lunch at a Whole Foods in Memphis, where the band has pulled over to give the bus driver some sleep. The election is two weeks away, and the city is damp and unnerving: Shortly after the bus parked in a hotel lot, someone tagged a nearby OBAMA/BIDEN sign with a lime-green 9/11 in plain view of a busy intersection. Even the cover of the local alt weekly is a downer, with a picture of Sarah Palin and Tina Fey and the headline IS THIS END TIMES? OR PRIME TIME?

Malone’s own worldview is similarly grave—he read Naomi Klein’s disas-ter-capitalism book The Shock Doctrine while working on Dear Science, and his Obama endorsement is hardly enthusiastic. (“I just voted for a dude who supports wiretapping,” he says of his absentee-ballot choice, “because that was the best option.”) But he has not allowed this to detract from the fact that his girlfriend is planning to move to Brooklyn from Portland, Oregon, to be with him. (Malone has an eight-year-old daughter from a previous relationship.) The romance inspired “Lover’s Day,” Dear Science’s closing track. It’s full of unabashed carnality, which makes it a rarity in the world of modern-day alt rock—just try to imagine Thom Yorke writing a hot-blooded line like “I’m gonna make you cum,” much less singing it without fainting. Considering that Cookie Mountain opened with Malone’s seven-word salvo about impotence of all kinds—“I was a lover / Before this war”—this is a good sign, yes?

“I was at a different point in life then and was seeing the world differently when we were doing Cookie Mountain,” Malone says. He’s wearing his signature tortoiseshell glasses and bushy beard touched with gray, both of which make him look owl-like. “The first protest I went to in New York before the war, the police shut it down. They got on horses and divided up the crowds and did mass arrests, and it was very discouraging. Not only do we not get to vote on this after a stolen elec-

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