The Neverly Boys were already well on their way to becoming a band when the group’s members actually met.

“Daniel and I had the same manager. He sent Daniel a couple beats that I’d made—Daniel wrote to them, sent them back and they were bananas,” TV on the Radio co-founder Dave Sitek says of his virtual introduction to his future Neverly Boys partner, Swedish-born musician and producer Daniel Ledinsky. “We did that a couple more times. The songs kept coming out great, but we were paranoid to meet. So, for a while, we were like, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t?’”

Of course, the musicians did eventually link up in person and they’ve become close collaborators during the past few years. In fact, as the Los Angeles-based Sitek is describing The Neverly Boys’ unusual genesis in advance of their debut LP, Dark Side of Everything, he’s sitting in a ranch studio working on the project’s next LP.

“We started with the 50 songs left over from the first album and said, ‘We could use these,’ but wound up writing 13 new ones while we were here,” he says with a chuckle. “So these other songs are getting moved to album three. We’re not really a band—we’re songwriters. I’m a producer in my other job, but I also do a lot of songwriting and Daniel does a lot of songwriting. It’s not the same as being in a band and trying to figure out what your identity is—what the collective message is. We don’t have goals like that—it’s more like, ‘What are we trying to say’ and getting that done in three and a half minutes.”

In certain ways, it was inevitable that Sitek and Ledinsky would find each other; the TV on the Radio multi-instrumentalist says they are both “outcasts in the regular mainstream music world who work with big artists.” In addition to his own band, Sitek has helped steward projects by Weezer, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Jane’s Addiction, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, while Ledinsky has added his touch to material by Carly Rae Jepsen, Tove Lo, Refused and Cee Lo Green. Together, they’ve worked with Blondie, Pussy Riot and even TV on the Radio. (Ledinsky co-wrote “Happy Idiot”—which Sitek says nailed his band’s feeling at the time of 2014’s Seeds—and “Trouble” with singer Tunde Adebimpe.)

“We’re the same kind of weird,” Sitek says. “After we started writing together, we started working with other artists—jumping into each other’s projects. Over time, we realized that we had all these songs that didn’t find the right artist in our back pocket. Then, a friend of mine who owns [the experimental music venue] Zebulon had a free night, so I booked us a gig. We did that show and one in El Paso while we were working on Dark Side and then COVID [happened].”

A few years ago, the duo casually released “Burn Hollywood,” which inspired them to keep chipping away at the eventual 60-70 song ideas they considered for the album, which was released in May. While the songwriters have left their fingerprints on a range of acts, with The Neverly Boys, they’ve honed in on what Sitek describes as “lonely astronaut music.” There’s a loose theme of feeling out of place and an emphasis on dark humor. “It’s not something that you could do with people who are really worried about their identities and careers,” he admits. “We write a lot of off-brand songs. We’re open books—whatever’s going on with us is going to wind up in a song.”

Though TV on the Radio helped define Brooklyn’s hipster scene around the turn of the millennium, Sitek was one of the first members of his social circle to decamp to LA in 2007—before the party followed him in search of sunnier pastures, straight out of the famous West Coast soirée scene from Annie Hall.

“TV on the Radio was touring 13 months at a time back then and, whenever we would come back, Brooklyn would be a different city—twice as populated with twice as much going on,” Sitek says. “Every time I came back, the prices were hiked up—friends and practice spaces were getting priced out of the neighborhood and venues were closing. That’s the universal story of New York. I said to myself: ‘Am I really going to fight to find another apartment in a city that just isn’t as much fun?’ I’d lived through such an incredible period in New York—I knew I’d just bitch about how it used to be. I found a place in LA on Craigslist while I was on tour. My brother packed up my apartment and studio while I was away.”

When Sitek was living in Brooklyn, Zebulon was located near his studio and quickly grew into a favorite local hang. Some of the guys from the club actually loaded Sitek’s moving truck before he veered West. And, when Zebulon was voted out of its building by new tenants looking for a quieter, more suburban life in the gentrifying city, Sitek suggested they relocate to LA and helped them find a new space across the country.

“LA was really dead when I moved out here—there wasn’t a whole lot of stuff going on,” he says. “But, when I moved to Brooklyn, there wasn’t a lot going on either. That excited me. It’s funny because a lot of New Yorkers left New York and moved out here. So if you go to Zebulon, you’ll see a lot of the people who were at the old Zebulon. And now a lot of people are leaving LA.”

He pauses to consider the challenges his city has faced in recent years and will need to grapple with on the other side of the novel coronavirus crises. “People are just rethinking city life in general,” he says.

These days, TV on the Radio’s core lineup is spread out; Sitek, Adebimpe and drummer Jahphet Landis live in LA, while Kyp Malone and Jaleel Bunton are holding it down in New York. While the ensemble had been relatively quiet even before the current global pandemic—they haven’t released an album since 2014 and have only toured sporadically while the members focused on a mix of visual and musical projects—the group did make their Madison Square Garden debut last year, opening for friends and influences Weezer and The Pixies. The support spot offered the band an opportunity to reclaim one of their own songs at the World’s Most Famous Arena.

“When we first heard about Phish covering ‘Golden Age,’ we thought people were kidding,” Sitek says with a laugh. “And then we saw a 16-minute video of ‘Golden Age’ from one of their New Year’s performances. My thought was, ‘Let’s take one of their 16-minute songs and make it three minutes,’ but we never got around to it. So that song had only been played in that building by Phish until that show, which is pretty funny.”