Tame Impala - Psych modernism from the southern hemisphere

Kevin Parker, the new Midas of global psych-pop, was born in Sydney, Australia, on January 20, 1986, to parents from South Africa (his father a Zimbabwe native, his mother from the Republic of South Africa), who divorced when their son was just three years old. Raised in Perth, Kevin soon developed a deep passion for music, and by his teenage years he could already play drums and guitar, dabbling in primitive home-recorded lo-fi experiments, laying down his own ideas on a home multi-track.

At 13 he started strumming away with his friend Dominic Simper, deepening his knowledge (and performance) of 60s and 70s psychedelic music. By 18 he was splitting his time between an office job and his first meaningful steps in small local bands.

The first seeds of what would become Tame Impala were planted in 2005, when, together with Simper and Luke Epstein (drummer, later replaced by Sam Devenport), he formed Dee Dee Dums. In 2007, with Jay Watson joining on drums, the band took on its current name, shortly afterwards releasing a self-titled EP, known to fans as H.I.T.S. 003, and signing to independent label Modular Recordings.

In reality, Tame Impala was the name under which Parker's home-made solo work was released, essentially a one-man band; the other two musicians were there to let him perform the songs live.

Tame Impala, often known by fans as "Antares Mira Sun", was the EP that in October 2008 marked the band's debut release for Modular, reaching number one on the Australian independent charts and getting plenty of radio airplay. Still somewhat raw in places, Tame Impala contained, in embryonic form, all the musical coordinates that would go on to define the group's future sound.

The six included tracks were chosen from a pool of around twenty songs recorded by Parker over the previous five years. Three of them also became singles, including a version of "Desire Be Desire Go", later revisited on the debut album.

The early tours, supporting major acts such as Muse, Black Keys, Kasabian, Mars Volta, MGMT and Yeasayer, along with the single "Sundown Syndrome" (2009, backed with "Remember Me", a cover of a dance hit that English DJ Blue Boy had taken to success twelve years earlier), sparked considerable curiosity ahead of the release of the debut album.

Innerspeaker arrived on 21 May 2010 and was met with unanimously positive reviews. What the band put together was an enveloping, pop-soaked psychedelic revival that had no intention of simply quoting and resurrecting the past, but rather set out to sow the seeds for the genre's future developments. The goal was to cross-pollinate the aromas of the hippie era with modern technology, blending Beatlesque experimental pop, Floydian catharsis, faint pre-prog echoes and modern electronics. In there you'll find the cosmic post-stoner of Dead Meadow, but also a shrewd cultural recycling of forms and structures from the more obscure corners of the 60s British psych scene (think "minor" heroes like Pink Fairies, Pretty Things and Creation).

Enjoyable musical mimicry, unpredictable songwriting and painstaking attention to detail are among the ingredients of this as imaginative as it is labyrinthine vertigo, in which dreamlike melodies are diluted into mystical sounds with liquid, oscillating contours, where mildly heavy guitars (and that's not an oxymoron) knead themselves into the metaphysical caress of a rhythmic mechanism tangentially rooted in the krautrock school. The band establish themselves as the latest standard-bearers of the Aussie school and, despite their penchant for ritualistic visions with magical resonances, never lose their formal composure: they never sacrifice precision and architectural solidity even when they let themselves be swept up by the centrifugal force of a free jam.

Between lysergic rides ("Lucidity", "The Bold Arrow Of Time", both with vaguely hard-rock traits), dreamy moments ("Why Won't You Make Up Your Mind?"), instrumental trips ("Jeremy's Storm"), Floydian flashes ("Runway, Houses, City, Couds" is perhaps the best summary of the whole album), circular ragas that open the doors of perception ("It Isn't Meant To Me"), Lennon-esque resurrections full of LSD visions ("Solitude Bliss", "Expectiation"), Innerspeaker becomes the new reference point of the global psychedelic pop scene. Even when the song format appears outwardly "normal", noisy, ambient "disruptive" interludes suddenly loom up in the middle of it, keeping everything personal and unpredictable, and the winks at certain seventies disco sounds ("Alter Ego") already anticipate some of the moves Parker would stamp more decisively onto his own creature a few years later.

For Rolling Stone, Innerspeaker is the album of the year; for everyone else, it's the record with the power to catapult the listener right into the middle of the summer of 1967, better than any other band of the era manages to do.

With the purchase of Innerspeaker, for a limited period, you could gain access to a live recording made in May 2009 at Melbourne's Corner Hotel: Live At The Corner. The live bonus features four tracks for a total of 25 minutes, live versions of already-released songs, but performed with different sounds and structures, in the form of improvised jams. The line-up consists of Parker (vocals and guitars), Jay Watson on drums, Dominic Simper on guitars and synths, and Nick Allbrook on bass.

By late 2011 Kevin Parker was already mixing the tracks that would give life to the second chapter of the saga, the acclaimed Lonerism, released on 5 October 2012. The recordings were pieced together on the fly during the two years spent on tour, bringing together a drum pattern recorded in New York, a guitar part laid down in Vienna, a vocal take recorded on a plane between Singapore and London, and so on. For this reason, the album at times takes on the character of a makeshift collection of travel notes ("She Just Won't Believe Me", for instance, sounds like a deliberately unfinished song), while still retaining an enviable consistency of sound and intent. Parker sings and plays all the instruments (hence, probably, the chosen title), except for a couple of contributions from Jay Watson on piano and synth.

Lonerism turns into something solid and definitive the discourse begun with the previous record, and makes tangible one of the finest expressions of guitar-driven (often fuzzed-out) psych-pop of our time. Heralding it all is the single "Elephant", the hardest-hitting track of the bunch, essentially a southern-hemisphere version of the rockiness signed Black Mountain. The most pronounced reference point of the whole record, though, remains the more acid-drenched Beatles, the India-flavoured ones, the Lennon-esque ones of "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" and "Strawberry Fields Forever", but reworked here with a contemporary indie spirit.

Inside Lonerism, gleaming, hyper-contagious pop gems appear as if by magic ("Apocalypse Dreams", "Why Won't They Talk To Me?", "Feels Like We Only Go Backwards"), with the power to redefine the very concept of modern psychedelia, establishing Tame Impala as the absolute reference band worldwide, and certainly the most important and influential act to come out of the southern hemisphere. A sunny, musically upbeat record with some irresistible instrumental codas ("Keep On Lying"), brilliantly acid-soaked fragments ("Nothing That Has Happened So Far Has Been Anything We Could Control") and a languid epilogue played out on piano notes ("Sun's Coming Up", once again in Lennon territory), artfully smudged with lo-fi noise.

Lonerism is named album of the year by NME and Rolling Stone Australia, ranks well in the lists of other trend-setting magazines such as Mojo, Spin and Uncut, picks up no fewer than three ARIAs (the Australian Grammys) and earns a prestigious Grammy Award nomination in the "Best Alternative Music Album" category.

This is the record that cements Tame Impala's international reputation and turns Kevin Parker into an in-demand collaborator. Among the records he lends a hand to, worth mentioning is the self-titled debut by Melody's Echo Chamber, the project of young Frenchwoman Melody Prochet, rumoured by those in the know to be his girlfriend at the time, which features the catchy single "I Follow You". Parker produces and contributes guitars, resulting in a record that undoubtedly takes on his sonic imprint, while leaning even more markedly towards a certain sunny, playful pop.

Also worth mentioning is his production work on three albums by the well-regarded Pond, the side project of Jay Watson and Nick Allbrook, both more or less permanent collaborators within the Tame Impala fold: "Beard, Wives, Denim" (2012), "Hobo Rocket" (2013) and "Man It Feels Like Space Again" (2015).

Meanwhile, the tour in support of Lonerism is going full steam ahead, and Kevin is hailed as the new shaman of modern psychedelia, a present-day nerd who managed to step out of his bedroom and stamp a distinctive mark on his own compositions, which sound unmistakably his even when played by other people. The persona becomes an icon, helped along by the fact that Parker always takes the stage barefoot and is often linked to the world of drugs.

In April 2014 Modular Recordings released the document of the show held on 10 October of the previous year at Chicago's Riviera Theatre. The line-up consists of the by-now-familiar trio of Parker, Simper and Watson (now switched to synths), plus a rhythm section made up of Cam Avery (bass) and Julien Barbagallo (drums). The live album is simply titled Live Versions.

In October 2013 a split EP shared with Flaming Lips was released, Peace And Paranoia Tour, on which each of the two bands reinterprets two of the other's songs. Tame Impala rework "Are You A Hypnotist?" and "Silver Trembling Hands" with just the right personal touch, while Flaming Lips cover the driving "Elephant" with great respect and dilute the already lysergic "Runway, Houses, City, Clouds" even further.

The collaboration had actually already begun the previous year, when Tame Impala took part in recording the track "Children Of The Moon", featured on "The Flaming Lips And Heady Fwends", a project through which Wayne Coyne's band invited musician friends to guest on every song.

Curiosity around the band's fateful third album — the one usually regarded as the "truth" record — reached fever pitch when, in early 2015, "Let It Happen" was released, a new composition that would later appear on the new record. Reactions were mixed: many longtime fans were caught off guard in a negative way, while others applauded the decision to swerve decisively toward electro.

"Let It Happen" is no fluke — it's meant to offer a prophecy of the band's new stylistic direction, containing within it all the seeds that would characterize the Australian outfit's new effort. It opens as a Jamiroquai-style funk midtempo, before settling into deeply Balearic, repetitive moods, material tailor-made for the dancefloor, a trendy pop perfect for anyone who loves Café del Mar sunsets, but hard to grasp for those expecting the Californian beaches of the summer of love from these grooves, rather than the Ibizan ones (though is there really such a difference?).

Tame Impala's newly charted path officially takes shape in July 2015 with the release of Currents, through which Parker and co. confirm their intention to test new musical trajectories rather than endlessly repeat themselves. The innovative light psych-rock project envisioned by Tame Impala is now realized by swapping out the tools used so far: synths take over center stage, pushing the guitars into the background, a secondary role compared to everything else. It's a shift that partly recalls what Radiohead attempted from "Ok Computer" and "Kid A" onward, with staggering results, or more recently (to cite the usual textbook examples) what Arcade Fire did on "Reflektor", with perhaps less successful but undoubtedly brave outcomes. It's also, at the same time, the very same step taken a few weeks earlier by Unknown Mortal Orchestra, also on their third album ("Multi-Love"), also hailing from the beaches of the Oceania continent. The flood of positive reactions online (a 9.3 on Pitchfork, no less — album-of-the-year territory!) regarding the band's zig-zag seems, however, more like an attempt to pay tribute to Parker the artist at all costs than the fruit of impartial analysis of the album's content. On cold reflection, Currents comes across as a half-successful experiment, one in which the author's intentions are clear (realizing a personal electro-disco-pop vision, maintaining continuity within discontinuity), but where the quality of the songwriting doesn't always manage to live up to the fame and aura surrounding good old Kevin.

Some ideas are very good ("Nangs", "Gossip") but cut off inexplicably too soon, remaining little more than song embryos; other solutions are pleasant but not fully realized ("Past Life", "The Moment"), with the added issue that in the second half the album tends to drag a bit ("Reality In Motion", "Love/Paranoia"), losing its bite. Of course there are also moments that work, where the mission of leaving Sixties hippy psychedelia in the background to dive into the disco of the following decade produces the contagious funk of "The Less I Know The Better" (one of the selection's high points), the pure pop of "Disciples" and the soul of "'Cause I'm A Man", with its muffled, bedroom-like atmospheres. Elsewhere, Tame Impala give the impression of coasting around an underlying architecture that Parker is determined to defend to the hilt, one that produces some quite pleasant flourishes (the big ballads "Yes I'm Changing" and "New Person, Same Old Mistakes" are a bit sly, but certainly can't be called failures), yet fail to produce the killer track capable of tipping the tracklist over the edge: for instance, the epic intro of "Eventually" promises much, but dissolves into embarrassing anonymity within seconds. All things considered, the band's first two albums even seem more adventurous when set against certain moments where Currents feels objectively contrived and not fully in focus.

Despite some reservations, Currents still achieves commercial success far beyond the band's previous work, topping the sales charts outside Australia for the first time (in the Netherlands), and within days climbing to third place on the UK charts and fourth on the US Billboard Top 200. Over the following four years Currents would be toured around the world, and Tame Impala would be called on to headline all the major international festivals, from Coachella to Primavera Sound to Mad Cool.

In his spare time Parker collaborates with numerous major artists, including Lady Gaga and Mark Ronson on the single "Perfect Illusion". Also worth noting are his collaborations with ZHU and Theophilus London.

In 2019 two new songs finally arrive, "Patience" and "Borderline", and in October it's announced that The Slow Rush, the band's fourth album, will be released in early 2020. Kevin Parker crafts a clever blend of the light psychedelia of the first two records and the groovy drift of the third. He writes twelve soft-rock tracks that persist in mediating between lysergic haze and pop music, winning over both nostalgics for the hippie era and ambitious young professionals obsessed with spritzes sipped in total white bars. Pleasing such wildly different listeners is no small feat, though he manages it.

The central theme of The Slow Rush is the relentless passage of time, well expressed by eloquent titles such as "One More Year", "Lost In Yesterday" and "Tomorrow's Dust", which transplants a very "Weird Fishes"-like arpeggio into lounge territory. It's a record steeped in regret (reflections on his complicated relationship with his father, recounted in "Posthumous Forgiveness"), romanticism (fueled by his recent marriage) and musical nostalgia for the past, materializing through a deft blending of numerous influences, mostly from the Seventies, with the addition of a few ambitious instrumental codas and frequent use of falsetto.

The Slow Rush moves effortlessly from the seventies disco of "Is It True" to the very Supertramp-style piano of "It Might Be Time", all the way to the funk filtered through the Daft Punk lens of "Glimmer". Everything is written, arranged and performed by Parker alone, who continues to proudly fly the flag of the lone hero. But Kevin's dream is to turn the world into one giant, ultra-colorful, hyper-pop discotheque, and he actually pulls it off perfectly on "Borderline". Maybe because inside a crowded discotheque, it's much easier to hide.

If some forms of modern club music can be perceived as contemporary evolutions of the concept of psychedelia, then the singular path taken by Kevin Parker — who has welcomed tech-house-derived sounds into his stylistic horizon ever since the release of "Let It Happen" — shouldn't be read as unnatural. The shift in direction is made even clearer both by the solo DJ sets he plays on the bills of major international festivals, and by his increasingly frequent collaborations with pop superstars such as Lady Gaga, Dua Lipa, Gorillaz and Justice. These aren't off-the-cuff forays: even the fifth album in his discography throws the doors wide open to unmistakable electronic influences, with Parker continuing to steer his creation toward an ever more "inclusive" form of psychedelia, starting with the soft Balearic sway that defines the opening "My Old Ways". Deadbeat, released in October 2025, arrives more than five years after "The Slow Rush", and the results are certainly no better. Parker lines up a series of utterly unremarkable tracks, an elegant way of saying "barely above mediocre". The techno-reggaeton of "Oblivion", the pandering sappiness of "Piece Of Heaven", the sheer poverty of ideas on display in "Obsolete" and "See You On Monday (You're Lost)" fail to disguise a record that doesn't settle on any clear direction, other than trying to prove Kevin Parker's credentials as an à la page producer, as eclectic as possible. A bet that doesn't pay off: when a great musician decides to stray off the beaten path, he'd do better to rely on experienced collaborators.

Instead, the songs on Deadbeat remain crushed under the weight of what they could have become, revealing a flatness that at times borders on embarrassing. And the saccharine tribal-amapiano approach of "No Reply" or the harmless little funk number "Dracula" (which we'd have struggled to accept even from fellow countrymen Parcels) aren't enough to serve as a lifeboat for a songwriting that has lost its sparkle and inspiration, dimming what was once recognized as an exceptionally sharp vision. Then, paradoxically, it turns out that Deadbeat delivers its best moments when it strays furthest from Tame Impala's origins, when forceful beats serve as the rails for the stripped-down architecture of "Not My World", "Ethereal Connection" (which carries the same propulsive force as "Born Slippy") and "End Of Summer". These tracks, while holding nothing original, at least seem to have their own intrinsic purpose: dragging us into a fun rave party, the kind known in Australia as bush doof. But if you listen closely, you'll notice a persistent melancholic streak, as if the party were actually group therapy, and the beats an anesthetic to numb us to the emptiness surrounding us, the disillusionment that strikes anyone who — like Parker — suddenly finds themselves on the threshold of their forties. Transposed into the context of next summer's massive open-air gatherings, these songs, alternated with the band's classic repertoire, will probably work damn well. Yet there remains that feeling of being perpetually stuck halfway across the river; it's no coincidence that one question keeps nagging at us while listening: if we really wanted to listen to great electronic music, would a Tame Impala album be the record to choose?

At this point in his career, Kevin Parker is seen by some as a talent in the midst of a premature decline, while others continue to regard him as an avant-gardist, a psychedelic visionary of our times with a fixation on electronic music. Perhaps the truth, as is often the case, lies somewhere in between: today Tame Impala are a good band capable of making enjoyable records of modern psychedelic pop. Their work should be listened to without too many expectations, seeking out the lightness and carefree spirit they're meant to convey. If they manage to entertain us, the band's main goal can be considered achieved.

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