A few weeks ago, Tunde Adebimpe woke up to see his phone alit with messages. “That never feels like a good thing,” he tells Rolling Stone, laughing. “The first five things were from friends. They’d be, like, just a gif of Spider-Man from the Sixties series and just one word, like, ‘Yo!’ Nobody explained anything for the first five messages, so I was extra confused. But then somebody wrote and said, ‘It’s in the movie.’”
Much to the singer’s surprise, Spider-Man: Brand New Day had prominently featured “Wolf Like Me,” a song he had recorded with his band, TV on the Radio, on their Return to Cookie Mountain album two decades ago. When the group had OK’d the movie to use the song, he didn’t know how the movie would feature it (“It could be coming out of someone’s headphones or in the background in a deli or something,” he says), so he was doubly surprised to hear “Wolf Like Me” serve as the soundtrack to the movie’s opening montage of Spidey parkouring all over the band’s hometown of New York City. “Oh, fuck, there it is,” he thought.
Since the movie opened on July 31, streams of “Wolf Like Me” have spiked dramatically. Up 834 percent in the last month, the song shot from around 32,300 streams on July 15 to around 269,500 on Aug. 5, and the interest has held steady. On Aug. 19, it was streamed around 217,500 times, according to music data company Luminate.
“TV on the Radio created a great song and the filmmakers created a great film, each independent of one another,” Chris Lakey, SVP of Global Creative Synch at Kobalt Music, tells Rolling Stone. His company serves as a representative for songs when music supervisors look to place them in movies. “When the right song meets the right scene, both can become something bigger. The song gives the scene new weight; the film gives the song new context, bringing it back into the cultural conversation and introducing it to a new audience. That’s what a great synch can do.”
For Adebimpe, the surge in interest is a full-circle moment in many ways. First, he describes himself as a “lapsed comic-book artist” and a “humongous comics nerd,” so watching what is essentially an homage to the first issue of Spider-Man brought to life and writ large on the silver screen, with his song playing in the background, was “definitely surreal.” He says he’d love a time machine right about now for the opportunity to tell middle school bullies, “One day I’m going to drop the nerd hammer on you, and you’re going to feel it so hard.” But what also makes him feel good about it all is the fact that, “This movie, it’s just really good.”
Another full circle moment? 2026 marks the 20th anniversary of Return to Cookie Mountain, the band’s second full-length. TV on the Radio plan to celebrate the milestone next year “in various capacities,” Adebimpe says. For now, though, the band is scheduled to play a gig in October with the Strokes and Beach House and hope to line up some gigs “mostly in New York” before the end of the year. The idea of commemorating Cookie Mountain crept on the group, which recently played shows commemorating the anniversary of their debut LP, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, so they’re figuring it out. “Next year, we’ll be doing more stuff and there’s more coming,” he says. But with Brand New Day, the timing couldn’t be better.
The lyrics Adebimpe wrote for “Wolf Like Me” in 2006 are about “the idea of whatever’s inside you being your true self and having that be more powerful than anything you’re trying to front as because you think there might be a danger in expressing this true self, and the idea that, at the right time, you can kick into high gear and be that true self and it would be actually for the best.” The title references Black Like Me, white journalist John Howard Griffin’s 1961 nonfiction book about darkening his skin to pass for Black in the Jim Crow South. “I don’t know how [the lyrics] crossfade with Black Like Me, but I feel like there’s something that maps onto it, at least spiritually, that I was thinking about,” he says. “And you write a song because it’s hard to put things into words sometimes.” (Separately, Adebimpe says his message beyond the music right now is, “Anything anyone can do to combat fascism is really necessary at this time.”)
Going one level deeper into full-circle moments for the song, though, is another peculiar connection between Adebimpe and Spider-Man. Jon Watts, the director of the track’s music video, would later direct Adebimpe in a small acting role in 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming.
“We nerded out about comics a lot while making that video,” the singer says. “One of the examples that I showed him for that video, and I don’t know if it really translated into it, but there’s this brilliant comic artist who’s good and weird named Al Columbia, and he did an underground comic called The Biologic Show. It had a vibe to it that I thought would map onto that song really well.”
Placing “Wolf Like Me” in Brand New Day has found the song a whole new audience, Adebimpe says. His friends have been texting him to say that their kids and their kids’ friends are now listening to TV on the Radio. “People sent me a lot of tweets and things, too, where parents are discovering [the song] with their teenage kids, which was a very odd feeling, but also a great feeling to know that for whatever reason the song sticks with people and means something,” he says. “It’s a good boost.”
When reminded that Nickelback’s “Hero” was the biggest breakout hit from a Spider-Man soundtrack circa 2003, roughly around the time TV on the Radio was getting on its first stages, Adebimpe laughs. “We’re a lateral move from Nickelback, definitely,” he says. “Also, I think filmmakers and music supervisors are the people who were fans of this music when it came out. So everyone leveled up into these positions where they’re like, ‘Oh, now I can draw from my influences and the well of music that I liked, and I can actually put this in this major motion picture.’
“It’s always nice,” he continues, “when it’s the message-in-a-bottle style thing of it coming back to you in a way where someone’s like, ‘I really appreciate that you put all these feelings and thoughts into a place where I could find them and connect with them on some level.’ I feel it’s very moving in a big way. It’s also really inspiring and encouraging.”
