If you came of age in the early-2010s, it can be hard to fathom that Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker has now spent more years affiliated with Rihanna than his local psych-rock scene. His ascent in pop music has required him to battle long-standing anxiety, a trait that otherwise made him comfortable as a self-reliant recording artist since starting the project. His latest album, ‘Deadbeat’, arrives as the clearest reminder of that. Here, Parker faces a new level of stardom and a greater unknown: fatherhood, as somewhat suggested by its artwork and title.
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By 2020, Parker crossed over to the pop industry, notching collaborations with the likes of Lady Gaga, Kanye West, and The Weeknd, after the slow-burning success of 2015’s ‘Currents’. The lysergic grooves of that year’s ‘The Slow Rush’, though less immediate than anything off ‘Currents’, were energised by these collaborations, along with the heartbeat of ’90s house music. In the same period, he got married, bought the seaside shack where he recorded ‘Innerspeaker’, won a Grammy, and worked on a full album with Dua Lipa.
By 2025, he’s in a different place in his career, but he hasn’t fully shaken off his hang-ups. Through his work, from ‘Innerspeaker’ to ‘Currents’, Parker’s overwhelming sense of unease with himself permeated his lyrics. If it wasn’t clear that Parker was a capital-I introvert struggling with self-esteem and heartbreak, his 2012 album ‘Lonerism’ spelled it out in bold typeface. Even as his brew of psychedelia metabolised into a velvet syrup of pop, his musings were, more often than not, given ample muscle and melody, resulting in a heaping dose of melancholy you could dance to.
But where on ‘The Slow Rush’ he sought to reconcile with his insecurities to ground himself through a new life, ‘Deadbeat’ is where he embraces them as part of his DNA. “The more success that I have, the more I feel like I’m living a lie. It’s a sham,” he offered to GQ, later adding that naming the album “felt so warm and comforting for the world to know that’s how I see myself”. The self-deprecation on its surface masks a deeper conflict within ‘Deadbeat’: that Parker has grown outside his comfort zone, only to strike a kind of lyrical inertia that becomes detrimental to his new vocabulary of music.
For one, the opening track ‘My Old Ways’ has Parker crooning “I tell myself I’m only human” over a piano loop, which builds into a sumptuous house rhythm, where he confesses he’s “barely coping” while “always fuckin’ up to something”. ‘No Reply’, a song about failing to answer his texts, features strains of amapiano and psych-pop as he laments about being too absorbed in his woes. In the dramatic disco of ‘Dracula’, inspired by Quincy Jones’ work on ‘Thriller’, Parker likens himself as a shut-in who finds solace in darkness: “I run back to the dark, now I’m Mr. Charisma, fucking Pablo Escobar”. By its fourth track ‘Loser’, the album’s first single, his insecurities are so hammered down to the listener – “I’m a tragedy / tryna figure my whole life out” – that it begins gets in the way of his arrangements, which so far are imaginative and varied compared to the stylistic tedium of ‘The Slow Rush’.
‘Oblivion’, the next track, buries Parker’s vocals in a hazy stream of sluggish dancehall where it sounds like even Parker figured to rein in the lyrics a bit. ‘Not My World’ shifts gears into formal tech-house, where Parker spends most of it drifting before it evolves into a big-room rave. Here, dance music’s ability to inspire catharsis and movement is hampered by Parker’s inability to move beyond his solipsism. The track also goes on far longer than it should, working better as a track for a DJ to cue rather than the midpoint of an album to compel listeners to continue.
Luckily, Parker finds his groove again on ‘Piece of Heaven’ and ‘Obsolete’, where his growing pains and struggle for peace are uplifted by, respectively, a synth-pop beat indebted to Enya’s ‘Orinoco Flow’ and an R&B cut with an unmistakable nod to Timbaland. ‘Ethereal Connection’ growls with its industrial techno flavour, bristling against Parker’s vocals as he sings sweet nothings: “You and I have something / That I never can describe”. It rounds back to the same problems most notable in ‘Oblivion’ and ‘Not My World’ – he struggles to match the propulsiveness of this music with his daydream scribbles. Closing track ‘End of Summer’ is a techno odyssey that exhibits more of the same, a coda to the malaise of the album.
In the GQ interview, Parker opened up about the parental neglect in his childhood, which fuelled his introversion and passive nature. At the time, listening to techno could make him feel “like I’m not physically where I am right now, like I’m in outer space”. The revelation – along with the choice of featuring his likeness embracing his child on the album cover – would suggest some sort of reclamation of his relationship with it, now that he’s in a much more rewarding, though demanding, point in his life. It worked to an extent on ‘The Slow Rush’, where Parker attempted to reach for sunlight. Here, where he’s out in the open, in full “bush doof” mode, the disconnect is simply hard to grasp.
Details
- Record label: Columbia Records
- Release date: October 17, 2025