Tame Impala
Deadbeat ★★★½
In the lead-up to Deadbeat, it was wildly uncertain what Kevin Parker was going for – the differences between the lead singles were peculiarly disparate.
Deadbeat, Tame Impala’s fifth album, may go down as one of his most important.
The first, End of Summer, was a seven-minute techno powerhouse, devoid of any of the sort of effects-heavy guitar licks that helped cement Tame Impala as a household name in the early 2010s, and ones that still reverberate as highly influential within the psychedelic-pop movement to this day.
The second, Loser, retained some of Parker’s earlier work, mostly though, his signature vocal production techniques that portrayed him as an anxious figure.
Dracula was somewhere in between, a hook-laden, 1970s disco-inspired banger with Parker likening himself to Pablo Escobar – and, you guessed it, a vampire – that sounded like it was picked up off the cutting-room floor from his production work on Dua Lipa’s 2024 record, Radical Optimism.
But what is clear on Deadbeat – and has been for some time – is that Parker’s ability to create a sonically unique record is unquestionable. He recently told this masthead that despite holding sessions at the famed Yallingup Wave House with his touring band mates and musician friends in the album’s preliminary stages, he realised, once again, he would need to be the Renaissance man.
His freedom of musical expression and clear affinity with techno and acid house is more prevalent than ever on Deadbeat, culminating in some of Tame Impala’s most experimental, yet challenging, tracks yet.
Kevin Parker is once again doing it all himself on Deadbeat.
Take the pulsing Not My World, which begins as a sweet, sun-drenched disposition before it unexpectedly transports you to the shadowy depths of a grungy Berlin-coded rave, or Ethereal Connection, an almost eight-minute long epic that follows the same structural formula almost verbatim, but is topped with detuned synthesisers and quick percussion passages during the midway point that are fundamental elements of the two genres.
