Tunde Adebimpe's brilliance strikes on Thee Black Boltz

Thee Black Boltz was a long time in the making: with interruptions, Adebimpe worked on it from late 2019 to the spring of 2024. During this period, the world witnessed a pandemic, and he lost his beloved younger sister. Making this album allowed him to process it all: “It was my way of building a rock or a platform for myself in the middle of this fucking ocean”. All of a sudden, the cover art makes perfect sense.

As for the meaning of the title, he offered this explanation in a podcast interview: “The black bolts are sparks of inspiration that can come in the middle of a very heavy time or a depression or events that seem to obscure the good things from your sight”. Those moments of illumination help you see the entire landscape, “and maybe [you] feel better and actually appreciate that darkness of it too.”

Accordingly, the record centres around light and its many manifestations – lightning, fire, sparks, beacons, stars and streetlights. It glows, shines, blazes and, regardless of its form or intensity, mostly symbolises hope or the opportunity for change. Adebimpe also applies it to people, though. In “ILY”, an affectionate tribute to his late sister, he describes her as “a beacon in the dark”, while in “Somebody New”, a synth-pop banger rooted in the 80s, he compares a partner – or maybe himself – to “lightning, free of the past”.

Ever since 2003’s Young Liars, the Brooklyn indie rock band’s debut EP, Adebampe’s lyrics have been layered and open to interpretation, capturing both the intimate and the universal. The songs here are no exception, and they explore his familiar tropes: love, identity, change. What is different is that he didn’t have his fellow group members to rely on, an experience he called “both terrifying and exhilarating”.

By his own admission, he’s not the person to be in charge of mixing and mastering, so he teamed up with producer Wilder Zoby, who has worked with hip-hop duo Run The Jewels. Adebimpe’s forte is making demos and fleshing out ideas, so he went back to the early days – circa turn of the millennium – when he would only use a four-track and some loop pedals.

What his multi-track recording sessions, his free writing and the time spent in his L.A. studio has yielded this time around doesn’t sound all that different from TVOTR’s output. The album is packed with synthesizers, exciting sound effects, sudden tempo changes and drops, and the delicacies he offers you along the way: the frantic guitar scrapes on the shapeshifting “Pinstack”; the beatbox intro to “Drop”, his mid-tempo musings on carrying on despite life’s challenges; or the twangy pedal steel guitar hovering in the background on “God Knows”, a song about a bittersweet break-up. You’ll need headphones to catch all these treats, but what you cannot miss is Adebimpe’s instantly recognisable voice.

With age, vocal chords lose their elasticity and range narrows, but time has yet to catch up with Adebimpe. After the short, spoken introduction that is the title track, he speak-sings, croons and shouts on the stomping “Magnetic”, sounding as good as he ever has. And the ease with which he moves between registers or breaks into falsetto, on “ILY” in particular, is still a joy to hear. Even when he sounds dazed and groggy, as he does at the beginning of “Blue”, the album’s most ominous-sounding track, you wouldn’t want him to change his voice.

The only thing you wish was different is his choice of what to include in each song. The tongue-in-cheek outro on “Ate The Moon” takes the edge off an otherwise dark, heavy song, while “Somebody New” could do without the short vocoder effect which sounds like it’s been lifted from a cheesy Stock Aitken Waterman record. Conversely, there are a few seconds on “The Most” when you feel a lack of real purpose as if Adebimpe wasn’t sure how to fill them.

Given the heights TVOTR has scaled during their career, making an album that’s on a par was always going to be a tall order. That said, even though Thee Black Boltz may fall short in comparison with the band’s best records, it still offers flashes of brilliance and maybe even some comfort if you’re going through a difficult patch. “Lightning strikes... / And my heart beats a spark of revival”, Adebimpe sings on “Drop”, and yours might just do the same.