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**TV On The Radio - Young Liars EP**
★★★★☆

The silence has been deafening since TV On The Radio called it quits in 2014, leaving behind a crater-sized hole in the landscape of experimental rock that no amount of indie darlings have managed to fill. But if you want to understand how five guys from Brooklyn managed to become one of the most vital bands of the 2000s, you need to rewind all the way back to 2003 and their stunning debut EP, Young Liars—a seven-song manifesto that announced the arrival of something genuinely revolutionary.

Long before they were headlining festivals and earning universal critical acclaim, TV On The Radio emerged from the fertile underground of early-2000s Brooklyn like some beautiful alien transmission. The band's origin story reads like indie rock folklore: Tunde Adebimpe and David Andrew Sitek met while working at a coffee shop, bonding over their shared love of everything from Sonic Youth to Nigerian Afrobeat. What started as bedroom experiments between the two friends gradually expanded into a full collective, with Kyp Malone, Jaleel Bunton, and Gerard Smith joining the fold to create something that defied easy categorization.

Young Liars captures the band in their primordial state—raw, urgent, and brimming with ideas that would later crystallize into their more polished full-lengths. This isn't the TV On The Radio of "Wolf Like Me" or "Golden Age"; this is something more feral and experimental, a band still figuring out how to channel their wildly diverse influences into something coherent. The result is mesmerizing.

Musically, Young Liars exists in its own universe, drawing from post-punk, electronic music, doo-wop, noise rock, and avant-garde composition with the fearless abandon of true innovators. Sitek's production work here is already extraordinary—layers of treated guitars, found sounds, and electronic textures create dense sonic landscapes that feel both intimate and expansive. Meanwhile, Adebimpe's vocals float through the mix like a ghost in the machine, equally capable of tender crooning and primal howling.

The EP opens with "Satellite," a slow-burning epic that builds from whispered vocals and minimal instrumentation into a towering wall of sound. It's a perfect introduction to the band's aesthetic—patient, hypnotic, and ultimately transcendent. The interplay between organic and electronic elements here would become a TV On The Radio trademark, but it's never felt more natural or necessary than on this track.

"Staring at the Sun" remains the EP's most immediately accessible moment, with its driving rhythm and relatively straightforward structure serving as a Trojan horse for some deeply weird sonic experimentation. The song's central riff is simultaneously catchy and unsettling, while Adebimpe's vocals dance between vulnerability and menace. It's the kind of song that sounds like nothing else while somehow feeling completely familiar.

But the real revelation is "Young Liars" itself, the EP's sprawling centerpiece that clocks in at over six minutes of pure sonic adventure. Built around a hypnotic drum loop and layers of treated vocals, the song unfolds like a fever dream, with new elements constantly emerging from the mix. It's here that the band's debt to groups like Can and Neu! becomes most apparent, but they're clearly not interested in simple homage—this is something entirely new.

The remaining tracks—"Blind," "Wear You Out," "Freeway," and "On a Train"—showcase different facets of the band's evolving sound, from the almost ambient drift of "Blind" to the motorik pulse of "On a Train." Each song feels like a transmission from a parallel universe where rock music evolved along completely different lines.

In retrospect, Young Liars stands as both a remarkable debut and a fascinating historical document. You can hear the seeds of everything TV On The Radio would become scattered throughout these seven songs—the gorgeous harmonies, the adventurous production, the seamless blend of electronic and organic elements. But there's also something here that they would never quite recapture: a sense of complete creative freedom, unencumbered by expectations or commercial considerations.

The EP's influence can be heard everywhere in contemporary indie rock, from the atmospheric soundscapes of bands like Deerhunter to the genre-blending experiments of groups like Death Grips. TV On The Radio may be gone, but Young Liars remains a blueprint for how rock music can evolve without losing its essential humanity—