Hear TV on the Radio, Faith No More Singers’ Avant-Garde Supergroup
The unlikely union of TV on the Radio singer Tunde Adebimpe, Faith No More frontman Mike Patton and rapper Adam “Doseone” Drucker – who call themselves Nevermen – will finally release their years-in-the-making self-titled debut this fall. But for now, the trio is teasing the album with the quirky, cinematic avant-pop single “Tough Towns.” Five minutes of eerie synthesizers and understated hip-hop beats, the song boils down to a single sentence that the singers all recite about persevering out of a small town: “It’s where everything you never want keeps coming from.”
“‘Tough Towns’ is dedicated to anyone remotely young, feeling inexplicably inspired in the ‘nowhere’ they are from,” says Drucker, who was born in Napa, Idaho, but grew up bouncing around between New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia. “May you soon escape with style into elsewhere.”
The roots of the group, which calls itself a “leaderless trio,” stretch back to Patton’s Peeping Tom album, which came out in 2006 and found the singer recording a song called “How You Feeling?” with Drucker. The Nevermen formed in 2008, when the rapper jammed with Adebimpe in a Brooklyn warehouse. The musicians later sent some of the music to Patton, who refigured it. The three band members then refined the recordings with one another over the years, recording the 10 songs that will appear on the Nevermen LP with no other outside musicians.
Visual artist Keith Tyson, a “fourth Never-man,” made the artwork for the album, as well as 100 copies of a limited-edition version of Nevermen. Those versions of the record will sport a unique mix and master of the album, as well as two bonus songs.