There Goes The Neighborhood: Dancing Through the Bullshit Beneath the Koscuiszko Bridge

Last weekend, TV On The Radio hosted its inaugural festival in Brooklyn. With support sets from the likes of SPELLLING, Moor Mother, Sudan Archives, and Flying Lotus, the event wasn't a nostalgia dump. It was a celebration of a city at a pivotal point in its history.

By Grace Robins-Somerville | September 19, 2025 | 2:30pm

Photos by Emilio Herce

Music Features TV On The Radio

There Goes The Neighborhood: Dancing Through the Bullshit Beneath the Koscuiszko Bridge

TV On The Radio’s inaugural There Goes The Neighborhood festival in Brooklyn is a celebration of a city at a pivotal point in its history. With the cost of living skyrocketing and the presence of ICE and militarized NYPD forces increasing in the Trump era, things in New York can feel pretty bleak to say the least. But on the flip side, we’’ve also seen New Yorkers refuse to comply with fascist demands—New York City’s been a hotbed for organizing against the rollout of anti-trans and anti-immigrant legislation, as well as the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. Back in June, on the one day that the city’s temperature hit the triple digits, DSA-endorsed candidate Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral primary against disgraced establishment Democrat Andrew Cuomo in a historic upset, and Mamdani’s lead in the general election shows little sign of slowing. I learned after the festival that Mamdani was allegedly invited to speak at There Goes The Neighborhood but declined; appearances at events like indie rock concerts were necessary when his campaign was still getting off the ground, but at this point, the kind of people at concerts like these don’t need to be convinced to vote for Mamdani—they’re already signed up to canvas for him next weekend.

When TV On The Radio takes the stage at Under the K Bridge Park, it feels like a homecoming as soon as the opening snares and synths of “Young Liars” begin to sizzle from the stage, boiling over into the overjoyed audience obscured by an army of smoke machines. We’ve lucked out weather-wise; summer lingers just enough through the mid-September afternoon, and by the time the sky darkens, a warm breeze still sways through the crowd, which varies in age, ethnicity, gender, pretty much every conceivable category. The venue is unassuming—a park located, as the name would suggest, underneath the Koscuiszko Bridge in the industrial area where Greenpoint and Williamsburg overlap, a long but worthwhile schlep from the nearest G and L train stops. Between sets, emcee Hannibal Buress calls Williamsburg the “gentrification final boss,” mentioning that he’d seen a Capital One Bank location get priced out of the neighborhood to make way for a luxury apartment complex. You know it’s bad when even the bank can’t make rent anymore.

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Throughout TV On The Radio’s set, magnetic frontman Tunde Adebimpe often introduces songs by saying the street address of the apartments where they were written and pointing in the general direction of where those were located—many just a block or two away from the park, some in buildings that no longer exist, almost all in buildings where the rent has since increased exponentially. Adebimpe mentions one apartment that he’d lived in during the early 2000s, across the street from a C-Town supermarket. Almost all of the business on that block had been replaced, “but the C-Town is still there!” he says, with a shit-eating grin. As someone who grew up in Brooklyn and has spent their entire life watching the city slough parts of itself off, it’s always funny to see what sticks around.

A year ago, TV On The Radio returned from their five-year hiatus and embarked on a 20th anniversary tour for their debut album, Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes. Following a run of dates earlier this year, the group struck while the iron was hot and announced that they’d be curating their own one-day music festival in Brooklyn. “We’re headlining, so it’d be weird if we asked, like, Doechii to do it,” TVOTR member Jaleel Bunton joked during our pre-festival Zoom call. “I think she’d be too busy.” He tells me that the band’s goal when curating the festival’s lineup was “authenticity above everything else, which automatically entails some eclecticism.” Bay Area baroque-punk band SPELLLING, experimental musician and poet Moor Mother, violin-toting dance-pop princess Sudan Archives, and EDM producer/DJ Flying Lotus all make up the festival’s support. These are artists who float between genres, never fitting neatly into any particular one, instead using their outsider status as an opportunity to carve out their own niches, often becoming uber-collaborators across genre lines.

For her most recent album Portrait of My Heart, SPELLLING frontwoman Tia Cabral recruited session musicians from hardcore bands like Turnstile and Zulu to honor her California punk roots. An Afro-Latina woman who’s spent most of her career in white- and male-dominated music scenes and a vocalist whose borderline-operatic soprano and fantastical aesthetic sensibilities are an unlikely match for the nu-metal and grunge-inflected sound she’s been drawn to, Cabral channels feelings of otherness into an otherworldly sound. Hearing her wail, “I don’t belong here!” at the chorus of Portrait’s title track during her kickoff set at There Goes The Neighborhood feels triumphant rather than mournful—she’s misfitted her way into a place where she undoubtedly belongs.

Before SPELLLING’s set begins, I have a few minutes to survey the festival grounds, check out some of the food offerings and vendors from various local businesses. Some of these are ones that Bunton mentioned by name during our conversation—a vintage clothing pop-up from local thrift store Other People’s Clothes, a makeshift roller rink and skate rental from Xanadu. “I have real philosophical and emotional conflicts with capitalism,” he said. “I understand it’s the system that we have agreed upon for the moment—hopefully that’ll change—but in that I really try to minimize the priority of that as far as sponsors and, you know, laser beams focused on your pockets all the time.”

We agree that one of the biggest pitfalls of modern music festivals is that many of them feel so suffocatingly corporate that the musical aspect gets impersonal, almost incidental, in a way that highlights how “brand identity” is an oxymoron. “A corporation doesn’t have these qualities but you have originality, you have ambition, you have creativity, you have integrity,” Bunton said.“That’s why they’re paying you. You’re loaning that to them.” It’s something I’m thinking of during Moor Mother’s set of spoken-word poetry backed by cacophonous jazz rock. Cool as hell in a crisp white button down and dark sunglasses, she enraptures the midday crowd, intoning with a priestlike command about generations upon generations of inherited colonial violence and no one to take accountability for the ongoing legacy of bloodshed that the so-called civilized world is built upon; immeasurable pain with no where to go. It’s a moment of levity when, towards the end of her set, she says, “Shoutout to TV On The Radio for having TASTE, and for making good choices!” Good taste isn’t something you can buy. Good taste takes time. It takes curiosity and commitment. Developing one’s artistic sensibilities is an act of creation itself.

“The intention of this band from its origin was to serve a very specific, very personal aesthetic that we were used to not being embraced,” Bunton said. “Like, this is my truth, I’m a marginalized person, I’m doing this, the world is not really on my team, but I’m serving a very small audience, and I always felt fine about that. And as it got more successful I was always a bit in disbelief, because I’d always been so primed to be disappointed—that’s how you keep yourself safe sometimes, by preparing yourself for disappointment.” Bunton got used to blocking out both the gushing praise and the occasional backlash as a protective measure, and it wasn’t until after TV On The Radio’s hiatus that he felt truly secure in celebrating his band’s impact. The warm welcome back that they received on the Desperate Youth tour was proof of their staying power: “It passed the era where it could be just a fad. Twenty years later, there’s still a lot of people who have a real connection with this.”

TV On The Radio were critically acclaimed when they were first active, but they never set out to be a “buzz band.” They certainly weren’t the most commercially successful act in the scene they’ve become associated with—now colloquially known as the “Meet Me In The Bathroom” era, named after the Strokes song and Lizzy Goodman’s oral history book—but they’re perhaps the group from that era whose overall output has been the most consistent and truly inventive, and one that seems to be largely absent from the reference boards behind the 2020s “indie sleaze” “revival.” (I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: you can’t revive a trend that barely existed to begin with.)

This says more about the people trying to piece together a “scene” from disparate scraps of subculture across a decade-plus time period than it does about the impact of the individual artists that defined the eras they’re pulling from. “Indie sleaze” is the Strokes and wearing a full suit to drink on the Lower East Side, but it’s also shutter shades and American Apparel and Cobrasnake party photography—all crammed behind the booth at Market Hotel where a DJ who was born after the Twin Towers fell is spinning AG Cook and the Dare remixes after a few too many $20 brat-green shots, proving that the shorter our collective memory gets and the less originality there is to offer, the easier it is to manufacture nostalgia. My apologies if I sound too cynical, but cynicism is all this “revival” has to offer, so I’ll meet it where it’s at.

“No one had any inclination that they were creating a scene coming out of the grunge era and whatever the ’90s were that was pushing artists to be anti-consumerist,” Bunton said of his bandmates and peers. “We all really bonded with that aspect. If we’re trying to honor something, it’s that spirit. The aesthetic is authenticity, it’s originality, and that’s always been the most important thing.” Bunton noted that, though his band and many others that became synonymous with the Meet Me In The Bathroom era were making music alongside one another, it didn’t feel like a unified movement, more so a loose array of musicians who just happened to be living and working near one another, feeling free to experiment without much thought to who might be listening.

“There was one point where I lived in a loft with Karen [O] and Nick [Zinner]. Yeah Yeah Yeahs had just started. This band Liars, Aaron [Hemphill] and Angus [Andrew] also lived in the loft. We had a rehearsal space down on South 4th Street—Interpol practiced there, Blonde Redhead practiced there, Secret Machines practiced there. What was the unifying force was that it was eclectic, that everyone there was authentic. My other band rehearsed right next door to Interpol, and we were never like ‘Oh, we wanna sound like the band next door.’ And vice versa. We never had any pull to do that, but we also had a lot of respect for each other.” Bunton ended our conversation on a sheepish but good-natured note: “I know it sounds really boring, but if you’re gonna spend a day with us, I hope it’s a rewarding day, an inspiring day, just a good time. Try not to fill your life with bullshit. That’s what I’m trying not to do, is fill your life with some bullshit.”

There Goes The Neighborhood doesn’t feel like an attempt to necromance a perfect, authentic era of New York that never actually existed. When it comes time to dance, people actually fucking dance. And I’m not talking some disaffected, too-cool head-bobbing—I’m talking Sudan Archives hopping offstage during the breakdown in “Freakalizer,” violin mounted to her back, hyping the crowd up with skyscraping high notes and a face so glowingly expressive that her eyes and smile seemed locked into a dance of their own. I’d seen Sudan Archives perform before, and have always been in awe of how contagious her delirious, un-selfconscious energy is. Her live shows are an immersive affair. When she’s onstage, it’s impossible not to groove and sweat along with her. Flying Lotus keeps the dance party going, his DJ set starting slow, with sensual, cool-down beats for the nighttime crowd catching their breath after a busy day of live music, then gradually upping the BPM for his louder, more danceable cuts—the perfect pump-up to activate the much-needed second wind for the headliners.

After “Young Liars,” TV On The Radio dive into the bassy, disco-grunge of “Golden Age” and then the frenzied dance-punk of “Lazerray.” Over two decades after they first formed, the band still sounds like they’re from the future—maybe not this one, maybe the future that took place (or has yet to take place) in some alternate timeline. Somewhat paradoxically, it’s the most present I’ve heard a band sound in years. Throughout the band’s set, Kyp Malone rallies the crowd in cries of solidarity with the victims of American fascism—from the immigrants being snatched off the streets and separated from their families by ICE agents, to the people of Palestine suffering under the genocidal rule of the Israeli apartheid state funded by American tax dollars.

Even at their most desirous or celebratory, there has always been an air of mourning in TV On The Radio’s music, often mourning something while it’s still on its way out. Their first two albums especially—Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes and Return To Cookie Mountain—are both largely about what it means to love (or crush, or fuck, or party, or rejoice) in times of war. When Adebimpe croons, “You were my favorite moment of a dead century,” it’s unclear whether he’s singing about the last one or the coming one, but either way, there is grief banging on the walls of each anguished expression of love.

Finally hearing “Wolf Like Me” live is a white-hot memory that’ll probably be cooling off in my mind ‘till I’m on my deathbed, but it’s TV On The Radio’s performance of the slow-simmering “Province” that casts a glow across the rest of the evening, its crashing cymbals and gilded harmonies echoing in my head as I emerge from under the bridge and am greeted by store lights guiding me on my midnight across through a city I’ve loved through a quarter-century’s worth of changes—a city that I sometimes feel like I’ve loved since long before I was born into it:

Suddenly, all your history’s ablaze
Try to breathe as the world disintegrates
Just like autumn leaves, we’re in for change
Holding tenderly to what remains

Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn, New York, currently based in Wilmington, North Carolina. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her work has appeared in The Alternative, Merry-Go-Round Magazine, Post-Trash, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.