Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes by TV on the Radio

Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, TV on the Radio's 2004 debut album, was cut at Headgear Studio on the band's Brooklyn home turf, with their own Dave Sitek producing, and it sounds like nothing else around: art rock built out of loops, fuzz and hymn-like harmonies, with Kyp Malone newly in the lineup and the voices stacked up so high they seem to hover over the static. "Staring at the Sun" returns from Young Liars with its intro trimmed, and "The Wrong Way" and "Dreams" show how far these guys could stretch a groove before it snapped.

Released on Touch and Go, it took the Shortlist Music Prize for 2004 and had topped 116,000 copies in the US by 2009. For its twentieth anniversary in 2024, band and label reissued it as a two-LP set with bonus tracks.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.