Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker has a gift. Everyone recognized it—pop stars, indie bloggers, psych rock enthusiasts deep in their feelings, and even “normies”, who’d crane their necks at the slinky introduction to “The Less I Know the Better” and inquire about the artist’s identity. For four albums, Parker, the brainbox behind the Tame Impala project, reigned. He warped reality with fuzzed-out rock on his first two albums, then dazzled with moody synths and groove-driven pop on the next.
Across each collection ran several throughlines: introspection, vulnerability, and Parker’s “must fill all white space” sonic maximalism. Parker became an emotional translator beloved for crafting soundscapes that echoed those complex feelings one could never put into words.
Fans of his rough-edged original work lamented the pivot to pop music after 2015’s Currents, but genre never truly mattered. Tame Impala always sounded like themselves. More synesthesia than synths, the music’s colors and textures emblazoned on the mind, stirred longings for people and places that might not exist, and hinted at a higher reality beyond this mortal coil.
When Parker announced his first album in five years, the world wondered, “What has the studio obsessive cooked up now?” He answered with his lead single, “End of Summer”. Although many embraced the new creative direction, others soon noticed that a few fundamental things had changed—the man with the musical Midas touch seemed to have run short of sonic gold. The result is Deadbeat.
Deadbeat is Kevin Parker’s electronic dance and house record, and it wants listeners to consider the multi-talented Grammy winner a loser. Inspired by Australia’s “bush doofs”, or outdoor raves, the collection emphasizes thumping drum machines and a more minimalistic, club-ready style. Thematically, it traces Parker’s youth and how his off-kilter habits have never entirely left him.
The opening track, “My Old Ways”, conveys this sense of entrapment. On it, Parker treats listeners to a fuss-free one-minute phone recording of him singing at the piano. It’s a rare glimpse of un-tinkered-with sound from the artist who banishes his own singles and replaces them with alternate versions.
“My Old Ways” then launches into polished vocals and the continued piano riff, exposing Parker in the throes of a moral dilemma. “I know why / I said never again / Temptation / Feels like it never ends,” he muses, spiraling into condemnations of his ego and “downward sloping” attitude. As one of Deadbeat’s finest moments, “My Old Ways” recalls the reflective, emotional power of Tame Impala’s music, illustrating a man tangled in his fragile humanity and making his woes danceable.
That momentum sharply declines in the subsequent “No Reply”. One of the two weakest song contenders, it features lyrics such as “You’re a cinephile / I watch Family Guy” and couches them in a series of increasingly stale verses. The track glides out on a gentle piano riff later echoed in “Piece of Heaven”, but the moment can’t fully redeem its earlier tedium.
“Not My World” suffers a similar fate. Parker’s vocals sound hypnagogic, as if captured after a late-night studio session. While the song builds to an interesting midpoint that showcases Parker’s slick dance sensibilities, it drifts into the ether, unresolved, on another flat utterance of the title.
These tracks mark a first for a Tame Impala album: filler. Despite flashes of Parker’s playful and introspective spirit, they’re largely skippable. So, too, is the dembow-structured “Oblivion”, an inoffensive but uninspired toe-tapper that might soundtrack the background of an afternoon plaza visit.
Misses aside, Deadbeat isn’t deprived of splendid moments. Groovers like “Afterthought” nod affectionately to 2010s American pop and those golden, uncomplicated summer days that seem trapped in the lockbox of nostalgia. “Obsolete” flexes a supple, funk-inflected bassline no less spiffy than “The Less I Know the Better”. Even the somewhat dubious “See You on Monday (You’re Lost)” offers such unreservedly yearning vocals that one can’t help but marvel at the humanity of them.
Deadbeat‘s singles fare as well as its album cuts, for the most part. Parker exercises his hook-writing muscles on “Dracula” and “Loser”, adding colorful new gems to his pop catalog and honoring his hunger for sugary straightforwardness. “Dracula” is a vibrant, synth-filled spiritual homage to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”.
“Loser” represents minimalism done right; its stripped-back, slightly self-conscious guitars and shuffling beat kick Parker for being a “tragedy” over his “worst behavior” and mirror the melancholy of “Borderline” from The Slow Rush. Its bridge sweeps into exquisite simplicity, where a clear-eyed Parker mourns his condition as a dismayed loner in an elegant, hauntingly transcendent moment.
Despite never quite reaching the euphoric highs of Tame Impala’s previous hits, both tracks reinforce Parker’s pop mastery. Some Parker-isms remain constant: sleek, airtight production, blissful hooks, flourishes of compelling melodic ideas, and his treacle tones that sweetened Currents and The Slow Rush. “End of Summer” strives for the replay value of its fellow singles at its halfway point when, like a flower slowly angling toward the sun, it suddenly opens.
The pleasant track weaves a bit of color into its thudding house beats. It outranks the cinephile lyric in “No Reply” with the beautifully lucid “Love doesn’t cast a shadow”, but its fellow seven-minute cousin, “Ethereal Connection”, contents itself with its emptiness. It’s a long, linear journey with no particular destination or many joy-filled excursions along the way. The beat pounds like an overworked heart and teases release, only to snatch it back and roll into another series of vacant thumps.
One track, however, outshines the pack. Tender, awe-filled, and instrumentally intriguing, “Piece of Heaven” is Deadbeat‘s emotional center. For all of Parker’s wry self-examination, this likely ode to his little girl, Peach Parker, unveils a parental purity never explored before in a Tame Impala song. “This room is in shambles / But I think it’s fine / To you, it’s untidy, maybe / To me, it’s divine,” Parker croons. For an album that spends much of its fifty-six minutes painting Parker in a loser light, this is a wonderful palate cleanser.
Altogether, Deadbeat reveals an artist seeking the sacred between imperfection and obsession. Its occasionally hollow instrumentation and thematic quasi-retreads—one could be forgiven for hoping Parker expressed more than half-felt grievances about his shortcomings and touched on fresh narrative territory—don’t dim the album’s bright spots. Parker’s fingerprints mark each track, and his enthusiasm for sonic evolution translates, even if unevenly.
In a culture that tends toward ironic winks and materialistic showboating, Deadbeat is an oasis of unfiltered sincerity. The lyrics don’t always land, and Parker’s refusal to scribble sound into every corner of his tracks is, admittedly, disappointing, considering his past creations.
Regardless of these artistic choices and a few genuine blunders, what matters is that Kevin Parker still searches for truth—and occasionally finds it here in his standout songs. It’s one quality, among many, that makes him a necessary voice in today’s entertainment sphere and well worth listeners’ attention for many more projects to come.