Scratch a Track: Music Review and Commentary Podcast · The Dude and Grimm Show

Is Dear Science by TV on the Radio a forgotten album?

·50 min·3 clips

The album was built to sound cleaner, with more space instead of constant layering.

The Dune Grimm Show opens by asking where Dear Science sits in TV on the Radio's catalog. They quickly confirm it as the band's 2008 third release. From there, the conversation turns into a ranking exercise. One host puts it in the top three. The other goes further and places it behind Seeds but above the rest. They talk through why Seeds still wins for one of them. They also bring up Desperate Youth and Bloodthirsty Babes with clear affection. They use Crying as an example of the album's reach, and one host hears it as something that could have lived on Return to Cookie Mountain. They also mention Halfway Home in that same stretch of comparison. The point is not that the songs are interchangeable. The point is that the band was still carrying a family resemblance across records. Dear Science, though, keeps its own shape. They keep returning to the horns and brass. That instrumentation is the thing that makes this record feel new to them. One of them remembers hearing TV on the Radio for the first time and thinking the sax lines sounded strange in the best way. They describe doubled sax parts, odd intervals, and dissonant little moves before the guitar comes in. Later, they joke about Bobby Keys and immediately reveal that they do not actually know that for sure. The ending of the title track sends them to Radiohead's Let Down, especially the way the keyboard figure trails off. They close by steering listeners toward their Seeds discussion and their broader TV on the Radio coverage.

As heard by us

A loose, memory-driven look at Dear Science that reaches the album through listening, not posture.

The episode works best when it treats Dear Science as a shift in feel rather than a point on a timeline. The hosts move through rankings and comparisons with Seeds, Desperate Youth and Bloodthirsty Babes, and Return to Cookie Mountain, while keeping attention on the horns,…

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Why you'd press play

You want a Dear Science ranking debate that stays close to the grooves.

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