An old wives' tale says that bad things come in threes. For TV On The Radio's Tunde Adebimpe, it's no superstition: it's real life. In 2019, as the global pandemic threatened to take his livelihood away, his band pressed pause after 18 years together, he suffered the loss of several loved ones, and 15 years' worth of music was stolen from his garage.

Armed with nothing but a 4-track recorder, a box of tapes tracing his musical thoughts from 1997 to 2008, and his experiences of grief, Tunde slowly fed the starter that would become his first audible sourdough: a solo record.

"Music is something that's in your body, it's in your lungs and your mind, and it keeps you focused on something," says Adebimpe, pencil in hand and a grin on his face from his Brooklyn home. "Writing the demos was a way to be like ok, I'm just going to make more music, and all of these factors, these human events, are going to affect this thing."

Grief has many guises. It might wash up on the shore of your soul, slowly settling in. Or wave after wave crashes against you, breaking you down. And if you're Adebimpe, it's a destructive tsunami - he just didn't forget his swimsuit.

"There was that loss of this vessel for music that I had become very familiar with; there was my stuff getting taken, like all these notes I'd taken for the past 15 years," sighs Adebimpe, a rare break from his wide-eyed grin, before the hope returns. "If you're human, you're probably going to experience some kind of big loss in your life; it's just what we do, but I feel very grateful I have the ability to sit somewhere and create a world out of nothing."

Less a world, more a galaxy, 'Thee Black Boltz' takes listeners on a cosmic trip through Adebimpe's mixtape of influences. A single listen sees you planet-hopping from 'Magnetic''s bluesy, breakneck garage-rock to 'Ate The Moon''s psychedelic funk, to the rustic, rootsy Americana of 'ILY' and 'God Knows' and onwards through 'Blue''s trip-hop and 'Somebody New''s 80s synth-pop.

Inspired by mixtapes his friends would make him as a teenager, Adebimpe characterises 'Thee Black Boltz' as "a bunch of different cities in the same stretch of land, they're just different spots to stop by." Maybe for listeners, that's true, but for Adebimpe, they're the sparks of inspiration that powered him out of rock bottom like Batman escaping Bane's pit.

"I think it's odd when people say I hit rock bottom, because maybe the feeling was of hitting rock bottom, but in the moment I have enough of a support system that I can sit in my rock bottom and write music," Adebimpe reflects, chuckling to himself as he reveals the origins of his album's title. "It's not like I'm in a field, oh shit, I don't know what's gonna happen next, but maybe it's like this rock is actually a piece of flint that sparks an emotion, and these dark storm clouds that yield a bolt of lightning that illuminates this heavy darkness."

The walking embodiment of 'when life gives you lemons, make lemonade', it's difficult to deny the positivity that pours out of Adebimpe. If TV On The Radio's hiatus was a planned pause, the pandemic was the emergency break that forced him to have a much-needed conversation with himself.

"I feel like sometimes stuff happens to you, and you're like, yeah, that's just regular, that affects everyone, and then you sit and think about it, and you're like, oh no, that sucked," explains Adebimpe. "A lot of it's about grief, where you can experience a really heavy grief, but you wouldn't experience that if you had not had the opportunity to really love these people in situations. For me, it was a gratitude for those moments of inspiration."

Once he'd bottled up those bolts of inspiration, he delivered them to multi-instrumentalist and long-time Run The Jewels collaborator Wilder Zoby and TV On The Radio's touring drummer Jahphet Landis. That's when Adebimpe's sketches of 'Thee Black Boltz' became sculptures.

"After the grand exodus of all this stuff I'd had for 15 years made its way out, bringing it to Wilder or Jahphet and having this conversation, like 'I wanna see what you guys do with this, and I'm not really going to talk too much about where they came from, but I just want you to get whatever feeling you're going to get from that'," says Adebimpe, painting a picture of the album's creation, and its impact on him. "Just the activity of sharing this stuff with your friends and having them contribute back to it totally pulled me out of that space."

Much like Adebimple, Zoby and Landis took the demos and ran marathons with them. Crashing comfort zones and pushing buttons, Zoby, in particular, went above and beyond the brief. "My one thing with him is, do whatever you want to do, just go for it. I'll tell you if it's too much. It was never too much; it was always exactly the right thing," says Adebimpe, until it wasn't.

While 'God Knows' rumbling rhythm section is vintage Adebimpe, Zoby's slide guitar transforms the track into rootsy Americana. "Playing it for friends, it was like, oh man, you wrote a country song, and immediately my body stiffened," laughs Adebimpe, who's fallen head over heels for the track. "I still don't call it that, but I like the way it came out. I think its instrumentation and production is really, really beautiful. When it was done, I was just like, that's in a realm where whatever weirdness there is lives, like I hung my weird jacket on the door."

On the flip side, the hyperspace-jumping 'Magnetic' is exactly what teenage Adebimpe would've been bumping. "I feel like if I had a time machine, I would go back and put it on the mixtape that my friend gave me," he says before shifting onto what he thinks it'll make people feel. "Hopefully, someone somewhere listens to it and actually feels like the words 'fuck off' can launch 1000 ships, and I want to find all of the ships. I want to launch them all at once, because I'm here for a limited amount of time, and I should go for it in whatever way I want to go for it."

Making the most of our limited time on this planet is a running theme for Adebimpe. It's also incredibly apt. Since 2019, Adebimpe's not only made a solo record, he's made himself at home in Hollywood's biggest franchises as an actor, and bought back TV On The Radio. For someone who's not taken a beat, it's funny it all started through wanting to.

"[TV On The Radio] didn't break up, but we needed a break, we needed a reset," smiles Adebimpe. "If I'm going to keep doing this in this structure with my friends, we gotta like each other again. And we do, but it requires us to go, 'Oh, we gotta go chill out for a second'."

Although he never really took the time to chill, TV On The Radio's return sent his disorganised mind spiralling for a second. "It's funny cause all the TV On The Radio stuff just started happening again out of nowhere right as I was finishing the record, and there was definitely a part of me that was like, this is both the best and worst time for this to happen, cause I didn't know how it would be navigable both things, but it's turned out to be totally fine."

Having taken advice from an artist friend when he first moved to New York to just do everything as no one knows how long they're here for, Adebimpe is always buzzing from project to project like a bee does flowers. Only, it's not always worked out for the best.

"Over the years, my brain will turn off in a certain direction, because I've been in situations where it's like, you need to go to sleep, and the reason you haven't been sleeping is because you did not plan, and this is your fault, three things are due, and you're not going to do it. It's not going to happen."

However, as 'Thee Black Boltz' arrives and TV On The Radio ramp their touring schedule back up, he's got a better system. "Now I've got a bit of a grid and really awesome people, too. My and TV On The Radio's manager is sort of like, 'Don't fuck up and do two things'. Do this one thing, and someone else could maybe handle that a little bit while you're doing the bulk of that."

Adebimpe's endless creativity is exactly what he hopes listeners take for themselves from 'Thee Black Boltz'. As if feeding off it like a power source, it's all about embracing life and making the most of it in whatever way, shape or form you want to.

"I hope that people find a place for themselves in it and sit where they want to sit. I hope you can write to it, I hope you can paint and draw to it, and I hope you can stare at a blank wall to it. I hope you can sit by the ocean to it. I hope you can blast it loud and dance around in your room or grab a group of friends and dance around."

"I hope that people feel exhilarated to do the things they wanna do, and I hope if you're in need of comfort by way of a shared experience of sadness, I hope there's that in there for you. If you feel completely fucked up and weird in the world and need someone to mirror that, you can find that on the record."