Label: Sub Pop
Release: April 18, 2025
By Krista Spies
A debut solo LP from a musician who has been in the business for about 24 years — if there’s ever been a spotlight on someone, it’s happening now.
Experimental rocker Tunde Adebimpe has much to live up to with his new album, Thee Black Boltz. As his first solo work in his two-plus-decades-long musical career, Thee Black Boltz establishes Adebimpe as a fortifying solo act and displays his artist talent that goes beyond something one might consider as a side project.
This inaugural record opens with a same-named first track, an electronic poem with rhyme and repetition that marries a speaking pattern that one would hear in great literary halls with static and an old radio sound. Though the piece is short and poetic, it is not slow but instead lively and agile. “Thee Black Boltz,” a confusing and contemplative message, echoes those three words several times and ends on the lines “Thee black boltz / I did hear all / I heard a tune,” commencing the greater artistic work.
The album then goes into “Magnetic,” the first single in anticipation of the LP. One line that stands out as a qualifier of the entire work comes in the first few lines: “I was thinking ‘bout the human race in the age of tenderness and rage.” That very duality — tenderness and rage, on both an individual and a large scale, materialze throughout the album as a whole, with Adebimpe’s personal touch as a reflection on his wider artistic career. How do those positive low-energy moments vs. those negative high-energy moments manifest in our rapidly developing lives?
More than just lyrically, “Magnetic” draws the listener in with a quick beat in combination with Adebimpe’s vocal alternation between a smooth, cool tone and a harsher chorus pattern. That upbeat pace comes in and out of the album — one finds the more buoyant melodies in “Ate The Moon,” “Pinstack,” and “Somebody New.” However, songs like “Drop” and “God Knows” find arrangements on that lower-energy side of things. More notably, track six, “ILY,” differs with most of the record, utilizing a repeated acoustic guitar picking pattern. A bit into the song, Adebimpe does bring in a recognizable drum machine beat that provides a complementary pairing with the more folky sounds.
Thee Black Boltz finished with “Streetlight Nuevo,” which continues the galactic synthy notes that populate the greater album. Bringing the listener back to the first few songs of the LP, he sings “I heard a tune. It was wild as the moon.” Then, at the end of the song, he also repeats “Just give me that sound, I’m only tryna see someone” before leaving us off with a final “Yeah, I heard a tune.” Electronic notes with intermittent piano tones accomplish the work after the last lyrics.
Fans know Tunde Adebimpe as a founding member of TV On The Radio and as a considerable collaborator with other creatives as well. Now, he has proved himself as a formidable solo artist with this full-length studio album — one reflects his musical career and ingenuity and also one that brings us to a very present moment, contemplating the complexities of humanity.