By the end of this week, Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio will have turned to the crowd at the Knockdown Center, in a post-industrial section of Queens, New York, and he will have sung, “I’m no madman/But that’s insanity.” By this point in the evening, the Brooklyn band will have played the first two songs from their essential 2008 record, Dear Science, the album they will perform that evening in its entirety for its tenth anniversary. It’s this lyric in the first verse of the third track, “Dancing Choose,” about being sane in an insane world, that will have shaped the evening.

This future perfect tense—what will have happened—is a bit unwieldy, but it’s one way to consider how TV on the Radio captured the beauty and terror of American life in that album. A decade later, some of the band’s criticisms of American politics and life remain true in ways that make Dear Science seem like a cruel predictor of our current times. In other ways, since the 2016 election, the political engagement Dear Science asked of its listeners has reemerged in fresh and energizing fashion, drawing frightening parallels while also suggesting a more positive future is possible. Times have and haven’t changed; as the legacy band returns to play their best-selling and most topical album, anxieties about state surveillance and violence, American imperialism, and racism feel as fresh as ever. What happened after 2008? The same thing that will have happened a few years from now, quite possibly.

Compared with 2018, there was no less urgency for political art in 2008. The world was on fire then, too: It was the beginning of a crippling financial crisis and another grinding year of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, of drone strikes on civilians. The American empire was drunk-driving itself across the globe and into a morass. And for Dear Science, released in the fall of 2008, there is hardly any talking of the album without talking about its popularity. The album went to No. 12 on the Billboard charts, eventually selling more than 250,000 copies, and remains the band’s best-selling and highest-charting record. Punching horns, tumbling polyrhythms, and throaty funk vocals, at turns menacing and hopeful, made Dear Science an artifact of its moment that also saw its way to a better time.

“It was the end of the Bush era, and there was a lot of frustration around the wars and American foreign policy in general,” TVOTR guitarist and singer Kyp Malone tells Pitchfork now. “It’s hard to remember a time before the Patriot Act, the ramping up of the surveillance state…It wasn’t in full swing yet, but the groundwork was being laid.”

These themes emerged on Dear Science, in explicit terms. “Red Dress” opens with Malone yelling, “Hey jackboot, fuck your war!” On “Crying,” the band sings, “And Mary and David smoke dung in the trenches/While Zion’s behavior never gets mentioned/The writing’s on your wall/And the blood on the cradle,” a reference to American support of the Israeli bombings of Palestinians. The funk, jazz, and rock instrumentation on the album reflected its political anxieties, whether in the elegy of “Crying,” the simmering rage of “DLZ,” or the buzzing cacophony of “Dancing Choose.”

The political messaging embedded in the album ranged widely. On the phone with Pitchfork, Adebimpe starts reading out loud from a commemorative book he’s producing for the Knockdown Center shows. It’s a list of inspirations for Dear Science; among them, “how religion and racism have shit on past, present, and the future, causing war and death of the innocent and the hoodwinked; hope in the face of bungled love and mortality; manifesting joy through revolutionary/radical love; a divided America where avowed racists and white supremacists were becoming outnumbered.”