By Paul Robicheau

Despite the passing years, personal loss, and shifting musical roles, Wednesday’s 80-minute set proved that everything’s indeed OK with TV on the Radio.

Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio at Roadrunner. Photo: Paul Robicheau

“Thank you for believing in us,” Tunde Adebimpe told the crowd at Roadrunner before TV on the Radio’s encore on Wednesday, having noted earlier that his band’s last visit seemed like “fucking forever ago!”

To be exact, it’s been 10 years since the Brooklyn band was last here, and that was for the Boston Calling Music Festival. It has been a long time since TV on the Radio drew critical acclaim with its coolly textural rock.

The band had to appreciate that Roadrunner was packed for its return with fans that lead singer Adebimpe lauded for “participating and bringing this one-time-only energy.” He was flanked by co-guitarists Kyp Malone (his signature beard in braids) and Jaleel Bunton, who initially moved from drums to bass after the 2011 death of bassist Gerard Smith from lung cancer.

Kyp Malone of TV on the Radio at Roadrunner (c) 2025 Photo: Paul Robicheau 

Granted, all but Adebimpe are multi-instrumentalists on record, along with producer, programmer (and band co-founder with Adebimpe) Dave Sitek, who sat out touring when TV on the Radio returned to the stage last year. Sitek’s sonic presence was missed, though Wednesday’s three original members were aided by a solid back line of new bassist Jesske Humes, drummer Jahphet Landis (who took over the kit from Bunton in 2011), and the also-settled Dave “Smoota” Smith, who injected keys and trombone

The band gave Wednesday’s crowd an immediate payoff. The set-opener “Young Liars” — the title track from TV on the Radio’s 2003 debut EP — felt like an exhale, an invocation via Adebimpe’s wordless exhortations that built to trombone as a final layer. Then came “Golden Age,” a favorite that the arena band Phish has popularized as a jammed-out cover. Adebimpe  paced to each side of his effects podium while clapping his hands (ahead of Malone’s vocal calling for that action), nudged by the implied funk of Landis’s cyclical hi-hat rhythm and Humes’s spidery bass anchor. By the end, the singer was levitating, pointing skyward and whipping his arms around. Then “Lazerray” completed the arc in a rocking rush, the usually calm Malone briefly jumping in place, his beard braids flopping in air.

“Happy Idiot” also came early as perhaps the band’s most accessible song, with its theme of lost love, tautly strummed bass, and melodic chorus “Since you left me, babe, it’s been a long way down.” And, soon after that, Adebimpe led the wound-up, crowd-pleasing surge of “Wolf Like Me,” Malone inserting a high-chiming fast strum of the type that put U2 on the map.

The set’s back end couldn’t quite maintain that momentum. “Could You” bolstered a human connection with Adebimpe’s plea “Could you open up your heart?” And while “DLZ” boasted the killer first line “Congratulations on the mess you made of things,” when the singer rattled through its climactic declaration “This is beginning to feel like the dawn of the loser forever,” his voice was enveloped in a sonic swirl with both Hume and Smith on synths.

Nonetheless, the encore took a powerful turn with the meditative “Killer Crane.” Crossed by foggy white spotlights, with Adebimpe softly whistling its intro over skeletal guitars, the song served as a beautiful tribute to bassist Smith (close to death by its time of release), echoed in such lines as “Sunshine I saw you through the hanging vine, a memory of what is mine fading away.”

Optimism also surged in “Trouble,” with Bunton adding acoustic guitar. Landis dropped a drumstick in mid-stroke as Adebimpe sang “Everything’s gonna be OK,” causing the drummer to break out laughing. Despite the passing years, personal loss, and shifting musical roles, Wednesday’s 80-minute set — heavy on songs from 2008’s Dear Science and 2014’s last album Seeds — proved that everything’s indeed OK with TV on the Radio. Now the only question is whether — or when  — the band will record again.

Paul Robicheau served more than 20 years as contributing editor for music at the Improper Bostonian in addition to writing and photography for The Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He was also the founding arts editor of Boston Metro.