Listening to Maximum Balloon, one gets a sense that Sitek is as energized by his collaborators as much as they are by him. His music for the album is amongst the sunniest he’s ever produced, and though die-hard TV on The Radio fans might be shocked by Maximum Balloon’s lightheartedness, for Sitek, that’s precisely the point. He wants to keep things unpredictable, like a wrench in the works: “The last thing I want to be doing is sitting behind a mixing board, balding but still with a ponytail, rocking out, with some 18 year old being like, ‘We’ve got to fly off the hook, dude!’ That’s a big fear of mine. That and landscaping.” For some reason, I can’t picture Dave Sitek mowing lawns any time soon.

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