While some musicians take pride in their prolificness, Tame Impala is the kind who prefers, well, the slow rush. This being the title of the last album Kevin Parker released under the Tame Impala moniker in 2020. In the five years since, he hasn’t exactly been a “deadbeat” just lounging around. Instead, he’s been working mostly on other people’s projects, not least of which was Dua Lipa’s 2024 album, Radical Optimism. To be sure, her lead single from it, “Houdini,” has Tame Impala’s sonic stamp all over it. And that’s exactly how Lipa wanted it, commenting of her long-standing admiration for Parker’s music, “In terms of things that I’m obsessed with, Currents has been the soundtrack to my life. It’s one of my favorite albums ever ever ever. It was kind of like the gateway drug for me into Tame Impala.”
Lipa isn’t wrong as, for many, that remains the album, even to this day (ten years since it was released). She further added of “snagging” him for Radical Optimism, “I’ve always looked up to him as someone that I’m really inspired by and he has always been on my dream board of people to work with.” And perhaps in Lipa, Parker found the final push he needed to fully embrace being as simultaneously pop and techno as possible. Two genres he’s circled for years now, but never wholly surrendered to. With his fifth record, Deadbeat, Tame Impala offers the best of both worlds, starting with the kickoff song, “My Old Ways.” Commencing with the “crude” iPhone recording of the track, Tame Impala spends one minute of the song building the listener up with his gentle, piano note-filled tale of woe, “So here I am once again, feel no good/I must be out of excuses, knew I would/Feels like it came out of nowhere this time/Wish I had someone else to blame/I tell myself I’m only human/I know I, I said never again/Temptation, feels like it never ends/I’m sliding, powerless as I descend…”
At the one minute and one-second mark, the sonic tone shifts into a “high-gloss” recording as the beat finally drops and Tame Impala repeats, “Back into my old ways again.” With its 90s house influence, the addiction theme fits in perfectly in terms of evoking an era when taking drugs felt far more tempting. This in the sense that, there used to be a greater number of social scenarios (especially at nighttime, “in da clerb”) in which one would actually feel enticed to do so. Hell, even in Tame Impala’s earlier days, with his debut, Innerspeaker, having come out in 2010, there were more occasions for socially-motivated drug-taking. At present, it feels increasingly more like a way to numb the pain of reality. Or perhaps just the boringness of it. And yes, in a sense, that has always been the case, but “back then,” the communal element of “getting fucked up” was much more of a factor. And it’s one that comes across in “My Old Ways.” This further enhanced by Parker setting the stage for the Sam Kristofski-directed video partially in New York City, the ultimate milieu to incite a person to say, “I know what’s comin’, ain’t so shockin’, always fuckin’ up to somethin’/Story swappin’, downhill sloping, barely coping” and “I know it’s always déjà vu.”
With a final rueful-sounding repetition of “back to my old ways again,” Tame Impala then leads into the slightly more “chipper” “No Reply.” Though “chipper,” of course, is a relative word for the perennially insecure Parker. And it is that insecurity which contributes to his self-styling as a “deadbeat.” Someone who can’t quite “comply” with what society deems to be a “useful” person. So it is that, amidst the up-tempo rhythm, Parker bemoans, “I apologize for the no reply/Wish I could describe what goes on inside/Get these butterflies/Man, they make me tired/I was so uptight and preoccupied/That I did not ask you about your life/And the things you like/How you spend your nights/And your 9 to 5/Are you that surprised?” That latter question alluding to the fact that everyone should know by now just what an “awkward lug” he is, and how, in trying to come across as at least “sort of” a person, he only ends up causing himself further anxiety as he wonders, “Was I impolite?/Was that joke alright?/I just want to seem like a normal guy.”
But it’s already long been apparent that Parker wasn’t built to be “normal,” nor live the “normal” life, even as he settles into his “family man” role, having also welcomed a second child while recording Deadbeat. Though it’s his first child, Peach, who appears on the album’s cover with him, this capturing a spontaneous moment when the photographer was snapping away on the set and Peach made a beeline for her father. When asked by Triple J’s Lucy Smith why Parker at last chose to actually include an image of himself on the cover this time around, Parker replied, “I wanted it to be, um, an album that is noticeably more, like, exposed. Of me. I just wanted to put my own self into it and out there… I just saw an opportunity to make an album that was noticeably more human.”
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Parker has chosen to do just that at the very moment when society is doing its best to veer as much away from “humanity” as possible (yes, that’s shade at AI). For humans are becoming, evidently, far too “messy” to deal with. Particularly those pesky “night people.” The ones that Parker refers to on “Dracula,” his third single from the record, and one that marked his first entry into the Billboard Hot 100. This perhaps due to working with another songwriter, Sarah Aarons, for the first time since Lonerism. That Aarons has a “pedigree” in “hit-making” (having previously worked with such chart-topping artists as Rosé, Tate McRae, Miley Cyrus and Zara Larsson) surely couldn’t have hurt. Perhaps gave Parker the final push he needed to go all in on creating a “spooky” dance banger. One that does share a certain sonic DNA with The Slow Rush’s “Borderline.” Except with the instruction “but make it Halloween and also a bit of an existential rumination on finding and losing and maybe finding again someone you have amorous feelings for at a rave.” Indeed, it’s generous of Tame Impala to offer up a new “Halloween-ready” anthem apart from “Thriller,” which is in desperate need of being retired.
In any case, all of Parker’s drug and alcohol-fueled bravura from the rave disappears with “Loser.” And, if there is one “defining” track on Deadbeat to encapsulate the theme, it’s this particular song—which, yes, of course takes its inspiration from Beck’s signature 1993 track of the same name. So much that Parker even has him cameo in the Joe Keery-starring video. In it, Keery is the “younger version” of Parker, a decision that echoes the fact that many of the songs on Deadbeat (including “No Reply”) draw their inspiration from Parker’s younger, even more insecurity-laden years. Thus, where Beck once said, “I’m a loser, baby/So why don’t you kill me?,” Tame Impala repurposes it to, “I’m a loser, babe/Do you wanna tear my heart out?” The self-deprecation continues with, “I’m a tragedy/Tryin’ to figure this whole mess out/I’m out of favor, my worst behavior.”
Like many songs on Deadbeat, “Loser” is also one that comes across as though it’s two songs in one, meandering in different sonic directions by the second half. At about the two-minute, twenty-six-second mark on “Loser,” this is exactly what happens, with Parker dreamily crooning, “I leave alone and/Dark streets I roam in/Night air, I breathe in/The stars I believe in.” Indeed, there was a time when Parker believed in the stars so much he was willing to major in astronomy while in college (having started out in engineering—though he only attended university at all because his father told him music was, in essence, a deadbeat’s pursuit). Parker’s affinity for the cosmos, however, remains omnipresent in his music. As is also apparent in “Oblivion” (not to be confused with Grimes’ 2012 song of the same name). Once again experimenting with sound to make it mirror the lyrics themselves, Parker commences with faraway-sounding vocals before leading into saying, you guessed it, “You’re so far away/Endlessly, I try to reach you.”
With “Oblivion,” whoever Parker is trying to reach (though one assumes it’s his wife), he must surely be getting through to, with such romantic, heart-on-his-sleeve lyrics as, “When I saw your face/I was hypnotized completely/I could see my future/Never yearned for life so deeply.” That word also having a certain drug-related connotation since, in order to achieve such a state of being unaware or unconscious of what’s happening around you, it typically requires some “mind-altering” aid. The dreamy tone of the song (even if one of its beats occasionally recalls Drake’s “One Dance”) is as key to making it sound romantic as the lyrics, “If I don’t get to you my love/Then I choose oblivion” and “If I never get to you/I’m going to oblivion.” It almost smacks of something Romeo would tell Juliet—and something he would actually do, considering he was willing to drink poison when he thought Juliet was dead. For both men, it seems that the declaration is that it’s “Not My World” if their respective lovers can’t be in it. And it is with “Not My World” that Parker continues to cultivate an ethereal soundscape. As a matter of fact, Parker was sure to call this song out to Triple J as being “kind of, like, the signature sound of Deadbeat.”
This not just in terms of gut-punching lyrics that speak to him feeling out of step with the rest of society, but also in the stripped-back nature of the instruments—at least to start out. This done with a drum machine filtered through a guitar as Tame Impala paints the picture, “Waking just in time to catch the last hours of sunlight [more “Dracula” vibes]/People going home, they walk by/Must be nice/Must be nice/Makes me realize/It’s not my world/It’s not my world.” Although simple and to the point, this small description cuts to the core of how it feels to be a “deadbeat.” In other words, an artist who really can’t keep the same hours as those 9 to 5ers (or what’s left of them, anyway).
After Tame Impala comes to this rather bittersweet conclusion, there’s still quite a bit of the song left, but he chooses to make it entirely instrumental as he plays with an array of musical intertwinements that help to get across the emotions he’s seeking to convey. Indeed, he also told Triple J, “The rhythms in my music will always be, you know, almost the most important thing. It just, for me, carries the, like, the groove carries the emotion.” And oh how it does so much carrying for the majority of “Not My World” until Tame Impala once more repeats “it’s not my world” twice at the very end.
He then leads into the jauntier-sounding “Piece of Heaven,” which almost has an INXS feel to it (think: “Never Tear Us Apart”). And then comes a dash of Enya as the musical layers start to build on one another. And, in contrast to “Not My World,” this is a song that finds Tame Impala totally at ease with not being a part of the outside world, going so far as to pronounce, “Now there is a whole world/Going on out there/Whatever I’m missing out on/In here I don’t care.” The reason? “‘Cause I’m in your bedroom/Now I’m your possession.”
But prior to finding this person who makes him feel like slightly less of an “anomaly,” Tame Impala speaks on “deadbeat qualities” again, starting the song out with, “This room is a shambles/But I think it’s fine/To you it’s untidy, maybe/To me it’s divine.” Establishing once again that he isn’t “normal” (granted, in previous tracks, he expressed wanting to be—though that has become increasingly less the case as the album goes on), Parker then speaks on finding another person whose bedroom is a “shambles,” too—therefore, just as “divine” to him as his own room. A “piece of heaven,” in fact. A world apart from the “real,” and oh so banal one outside.
At the three-minute, forty-three-second mark, Tame Impala pulls that “two songs in one” maneuver again, with the track becoming all piano as he muses in a chanting kind of way, “It won’t make a difference/You can lie all your life/It won’t make a difference/You can try all your life.” Not exactly encouraging words after such a romantic, uplifting few minutes. But, then again, maybe what Parker is trying to say is that, you can lie to yourself all your life that you don’t want love, and you can try (“secretly”) all your life to find it. But, in the end, it’s as Parker himself once said on Currents: you just have to “let it happen.”
With “Obsolete,” however, there’s another “comedown” from the high of love (or any general state of euphoria), with Tame Impala getting right to the point as announces, “Talk is cheap, but the words cut deep/Promises get old, they get hard to keep/Tell me, please, ‘cause I’m losing sleep/Do you want my love? Is it obsolete?” Here, too, it bears noting that, once again, Tame Impala is tapping into the general through the specific. Almost as though he’s asking if love overall is obsolete in the face of the current climate. Not just his own for this particular person he’s addressing. A person he also feels obliged to tell, “Always was so easy hanging out/But it sure doesn’t feel like that now/I know that you have been feeling rough/Or are you falling out of love?”
The more this person seems to ignore him, however, the more he starts to spiral, adding ‘Cause I’m already talkin’ like it’s done/Saying things like, ‘At least we had some fun’/And things like, ‘I guess we met too young.’” The spiral only continues to augment as the song progresses, with Tame Impala growing almost full-tilt hostile when he says, “Just tell me what is/Tell me what is up/I’ve almost had enough/You’re playing with my love/Just tell me what is up/Yes, really what the fuck?”
The R&B influence on Tame Impala’s musical style is also most prominent on “Obsolete,” particularly as it goes on the now standard “two songs in one” path at about the three-minute, twenty-one-second mark, segueing listeners out of this universe and into the one of “Ethereal Connection,” which goes all-out techno. A big deal for the person who once, per Triple J, used to describe techno music as a “guilty pleasure” (not unlike Madonna deriding it entirely before she made an electronic album in the form of Ray of Light). With “Ethereal Connection” (which fittingly served as the B-side to the almost as techno-y “End of Summer”), Tame Impala makes up for all that last time by taking listeners on what amounts to an odyssey through the club (sort of like what Charli XCX does with “365” on Brat), with all its various sounds and emotional highs and lows.
Like “Not My World,” it is also far more reliant on music than it is lyrics, with Tame Impala saying one verse just twice during the seven minutes and forty-two seconds that the song runs for (and yes, it’s also got a certain LCD Soundsystem feel to it, and not just in terms of length). That verse being: “Don’t believe in magic/All the harder that I try/But you and I have something/That I can never describe/Take a ride/Say goodbye/I don’t say it too often/Isn’t usually my style/I’m here whatever happens/Don’t you know that I’ll stand by?/By your side/Until the end of time.” Or, as Lana Del Rey would put it, “I will love you till the end of time/I would wait a million years.”
At another moment during the Triple J interview, Parker remarked, “I’m always talking about songs as though they’re, like, people that have their own personalities.” And if “See You On Monday (You’re Lost)” could be attributed with one, it would be “Eeyore.” This not just in terms of the musical pitch and tempo, but also the palpable resignation and ennui in the lyrics, “And it happens at every turn I’m at/Somewhat steady, but please don’t call me that/And it happens at every turn I’m at/Something beckoning me and I turn back.” As the song goes on, the repetition of “you’re lost” once more taps into the struggle of a deadbeat, perennially searching for a way to feel, well, not so lost compared to everyone else around them, all of whom appear to have it “together.” To be “found.”
Such observations from a deadbeat can inevitably lead him to feel like an “Afterthought.” This track (also co-written with Sarah Aarons) being another sonic pendulum swing from one emotional extreme to another. For where “See You On Monday (You’re Lost)” was downtrodden and “Eeyore”-like, the personality of this track is frenetic and unrelenting (almost serving as Tame Impala’s version of Rick James’ “Give It To Me Baby,” musical backing-wise). And, in it, he derides the object of his affection for, well, effectively deriding him by treating him like an “afterthought.” Almost like it was tailor-made for “friend guys” everywhere (like Brian Krakow in My So-Called Life)—the ones who keep hoping against hope that their friend who’s a girl that they’ve been obsessed with for ages will finally notice them. You know, in that way.
Parker comes across as exactly such a type as he paints the picture, “I might be crazy/Senses betray me/Are you parading all your lovers to bait me?/You only call me/To drive you to safety/But you never stay, must be so easy to play me/I can be emotional/If you need me to/Tell me, what do I say to turn this around?” Alas, for a man so firmly relegated into the “friend zone” (or, worse still, the “to be taken advantage of” zone), there is nothing to be said to “turn this around.” Regardless, Tame Impala still has the sense of shamelessness to say, “I beg you, don’t make me say it out loud/No matter what I do/I’m an afterthought to you.”
Continuing to play into that bereft “friend zoned” motif, Tame Impala opts to round out the album with, “End of Summer,” which was the first single from Deadbeat, and the one to give listeners a glimpse into the techno-oriented direction the album was going to take. And it, too, speaks to one person in a friendship wanting to take it to the next level as Parker sings, “Everybody knows how I feel about you/So you can act surprised if you need to/And I am still your friend if you think it’s worth it.” In a sense, too, it’s almost as if Tame Impala is speaking directly to his listener in regard to how long it’s taken him to “return” with an album.
And, as for the amount of time it took for Parker to finally “push” Deadbeat out of himself, he said it best when Zane Lowe mentioned how, the last time they talked, he was saying how lost he had gotten in making The Slow Rush. To this, Parker returned, “I think you have to. You have to get lost in it. If I’m not completely consumed by it and, like, just sort of felt like I’ve dropped off the face of the Earth in doing it, then I haven’t gone deep enough, you know? I honestly thought this album was gonna be the album that didn’t take years off my life. Like, mentally.” But what Tame Impala has lost mentally, he more than gives back to the minds of others with this record. Particularly in terms of its “concept,” which taps into so many people’s insecurities about themselves—namely, those who had the “audacity” to pursue art over a “career.”
In characterizing why he chose to put the neon sign “Deadbeat” above himself, as it were, Parker told Triple J, “All the feelings that I’ve had in my life of, like, being a dropout, being a deadbeat, being hopeless, being a space cadet—that’s still how I feel. You know, I still feel, um, like I’m sort of constantly ‘therapying myself’ against these feelings.” And, in turn, the fellow “deadbeats” can “therapy themselves” with Deadbeat.
