Did you ever watch the video of TV On The Radio playing "Wolf Like Me" on David Letterman's Late Show in 2006? It's one of the all-time great TV performances. TVOTR were young and hungry, and they'd just made the single most anthemic song of a great career. They'd never been on TV before, and they attacked that stage with a fire-eyed intensity that somehow came through clearly on television. It's fucking awesome. Why am I even talking about this? If you've never seen it, you should watch it right now. If you have seen it, you should watch it again right now.
This past summer, TV On The Radio went through a couple of momentous events. First, their classic Return To Cookie Mountain celebrated its 20th anniversary. Second, "Wolf Like Me" found a whole new audience. The song gets in early needledrop in the motion picture Spider-Man: Brand New Day — a rare jolt of New York culture for a movie mostly shot in Glasgow. Since then, "Wolf Like Me" has been having a viral TikTok moment. Many of us already knew it as one of the great rock songs of the '00s, but now a younger generation is learning it, too. I'd like to think that TVOTR would've been on last night's Kimmel even without that resurgence.
David Letterman brought TVOTR back to his Late Show in 2011, and they did another sick version of "Wolf Like Me" then. We don't have Letterman's Late Show anymore. We don't even have Stephen Colbert's Late Show. But we do have Jimmy Kimmel Live!, which kicked off its annual run of Brooklyn shows on Monday night. The night's guests where Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Pete Davidson, and TV On The Radio, now intermittently active after returning from hiatus in 2024. On the show, they burned their way through "Wolf Like Me," once again bringing serious passion and ferocity to the track. It's not 2006 anymore, but we can pretend. Watch it below.
