Check out the new video from TV on the Radio, for "Golden Age," from their upcoming masterwork, Dear Science.

The S.S. caught up with TVOTR producer/guitarist Dave Sitek, after one of the band's recent rehearsals in Brooklyn. He told us the story behind the disc. Click more to check it out.

Can you take us back to the beginning of Dear Science?

When we got off tour last year, after Lollapalooza, everyone kind of had it on the back burner that eventually we would be recording new songs, and then as the Fall went on people just wound up accumulating a couple ideas and then we'd listen to each other's stuff in November and December. I guess I decided to start recording in February once we had enough material, and then we pretty much just went February, March, April, May and June.

And things went smoothly?

Oh, yeah! We're ultra-flexible (laughs).  To the point where we are almost vapors.  It's like we just let ideas keep spinning around and disappearing and coming back. You know, we had considerably more material to work with this time around, because we hadn't really had a chance to work with each other between the last tour and record, so this time was a luxury.  We had some time off, we got to experience things… which makes it a lot easier when you're writing about experiencing things than making a whole entire album about being on tour. 

Regular life happens and I think  this band is pretty adherent to drawing from personal experience, so I think that Kyp and Tunde are probably the best people to talk to about lyrical content and how it related to their life.  But we're pretty good about documenting what it's like to be human. 

And as far as your approach to the production of Dear Science…

You know, I think I accomplished a great deal with… I achieved my goals instead of making giant, muddy walls of sound that you can't pick through.  And I think that this time I just wanted to try a few different angles, i.e. very small and bright, clear angles. Not a whole lot of stuff going on at the same time.  I bypassed the board entirely. So I didn't use a mixing board for anything except mixing. 

I've got a ton of mic pre's and compressors, but I just went direct. We didn't use any amplifiers, except one song that we used a guitar amp on. All the rest of the guitars were direct. The bass was direct. The keyboards were direct.  I wish I could say the vocals were direct but that's not possible yet. 

This was your preconceived goal?

Yeah, I wanted to like, push it to its furthest extreme. We've always recorded in giant spaces with all this extra mic sound – and I was just like, "Why cheat people out of the experience?" It would be gimmicky at this point to do the same exact thing we did on the last one. We wanted to make it interesting for us, certainly, and for anyone who's listening to the record. We want it to be a step in a different direction.  Rather than make "Jumping Jack Flash" over and over and over again, we decided to do "Waiting on a Friend."  (Laughs).

That's like a 180 degree turn from Cookie Mountain? 

I had been doing record by record by record, back to back to back to back.  So I think that my personal aim was to go in this direction, and the band's really supportive of trying new things and experimenting. I think that they were looking forward to doing new things as well. And then once we started experimenting with it we were like, "Oh, we should really explore this, there are so many different possibilities from this."

Right about now, how psyched are you to be in TV on the Radio?

I'm lucky – that's pretty much what it boils down to.  To be in a band with this caliber of talent and for them to be as flexible as they are… Nobody in this band puts anything other than what's interesting for all of us into the equation.  It's like we recognize that it's a group setting, this is an arena for us to explore things together, so there's not a lot of grand standing in our band. You know?

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