Tame Impala’s ‘Deadbeat’ Is the Most Disappointing Album I’ve Ever Listened To
Why Kevin Parker’s fifth studio album doesn’t meet the bar he’s set for himself
It might be easy to read the title of this piece and assume that disappointing means bad. But the truth is, I don’t think that Tame Impala has ever released a bad album. My assessment of Deadbeat has far more to do with my sky-high expectations for it than the actual quality of the finished product.
Drawing a parallel to the world of video games, people have been waiting so long for Grand Theft Auto VI that if it earns anything less than the “Game of the Year” title, it’s destined to disappoint fans. With well over a decade since the GTA series’ previous iteration, anticipation around this borderline folkloric followup is greater than it’s been for any other game in history. It’s cost more to develop than it did to build the Burj Khalifa, and taken over twice as long to construct.
Perhaps it’s not fair to compare Tame Impala to the most anticipated video game of a generation. Or to the world’s tallest skyscraper. But for this fan, those are the heights that his previous albums have regularly achieved. Upholding that standard indefinitely would have never been an easy task.
Whether to refer to Tame Impala as a “he” or “they” can be a bit confusing. In the studio, Parker and Tame Impala are one and the same; he’s the sole mind behind each of his albums. But live, Tame Impala is a full band that puts on a show that’s so meticulously well orchestrated that it’s second to none — at least in my book. It’s as sonically pleasing as it is visually spectacular, and is one of the few live performances where nothing gets lost in translation in the leap between studio and stage. The shift is seamless and only augments what fans love about Parker’s solo work.
There’s no musical artist that’s shaped my late teens and twenties as much as Tame Impala. Seeing his band perform in person made for the greatest live concert I’ve ever experienced.
At his best, Tame Impala has tapped into that elusive dimension in music where expressing its value demands a vocabulary I don’t possess. It draws from something so cosmically wordless and weightless that I can’t help but wonder whether its impact was largely a product of entering my life at the right place and the right time. Maybe that’s why it meant what it did. Maybe that’s why all attempts to elucidate its transcendent nature feel so fated to fall short. My experience with Tame Impala was unique. Generational. It was as coming-of-age as the Grateful Dead was for my father and his peers.
Parker offered the soundtrack that blared in the background as I debated where to go in life, and it remained with me as I pieced together who I was. Listening to Deadbeat, I can’t help but fear that the effect his earlier music had on me was something that would always be impossible to imitate. Did it mean what it did because it was there for me as I became who I am? Will I ever be fully receptive to that same sense of transformative wonder again? No matter what Parker writes or how he performs it, I worry that I can never replicate the circumstances that made his music so soul-stirringly meaningful during that fraught period in time.
In television and cinema, it’s rare for a sequel to outdo the original. No matter how many runaway followups Jurassic Park gets, they’ll never soar beyond the heights of that original entry. Whether Jaws, The Lion King, or Die Hard, the initial films set standards that were practically untouchable. Some TV series improve as time goes on, but more often, they lose their identity as they get renewed beyond their natural expiration dates.
Among bands and musicians, it’s a similarly recurrent theme for acts to lose their luster as time goes on. From Bob Dylan and The Doors to MGMT, Eminem, and Green Day, their early work was so magnetic for fans that topping it would have always been a Herculean task.
So what Kevin Parker seems to be going through is familiar. With four spectacular albums to his name, it was hard to imagine he could retain that momentum forever. Compounding matters is the stage of life he’s entered into since his fourth album was released. Just as Taylor Swift’s lyrical prowess and soul feel distant in her first post-engagement-to-Travis-Kelce studio album, Kevin Parker, now settled with a wife and kids, may just be having a hard time accessing the same emotional highs (and lows) that his previous albums exhibited.
Maybe, just as I’m no longer the person I was when I discovered his music, he’s no longer the person he was when he wrote it. Maybe the changes he underwent throughout those first few albums were as inimitable for him as a musician as they were for me as a listener. Maybe the excitement he felt in building a name for himself was comparable to the wide-eyed rush of creativity that coupled my entry into the world of writing; this subsequent burnout phase in his music mirrors the sense of dysphoria that’s crept in for me as I’ve achieved highs in my career that I once thought unreachable.
Something I admire about Parker is that each of his albums has been more a product of the new avenues he wants to explore in his work rather than what he knows his fans want. Currents, his third album, was a notable departure from the full-fledged psychedelic rock of his earlier work. He began to veer more toward a disco pop aesthetic that lingered into his 2020 release, The Slow Rush. But in each of his first four albums, his passion and commitment poured out of every track. His fifth is the first that feels outright uninspired. One comment I came across likened Deadbeat to an album full of cheap Tame Impala remixes rather than originals. It’s a far cry from the pulse of sincerity that once enamored me.
At worst, I think the songs come across almost like AI-generated imitations of his prior work. It sounds familiar, yet fails to evoke any real sense of catharsis. The humanity is diluted.
As a review on thedjslist.com put it, “But the sense of craft that made Tame Impala stand out in the first place is all but gone. Instead of lavishly reminding us of simple joys like a snappy R&B beat switch or a good flanger-pedal drop, we get drum machines sloppily plugged into guitar amps and left to spin their rudimentary loops; none of this stuff ever really explores how freeing, powerful, or even therapeutic dance music can be… [Deadbeat] is exhausting, a daisy-chain of shaky half-measures that doesn’t even feel particularly committed to being depressing.”
The vocals are clearly Kevin’s, and there’s plenty of his ingenuity on display. But there’s something about the culmination that just sounds vacant. Tame Impala was one of the few bands I’ve ever encountered that met the “no-skips” standard for me. Between Lonerism, Innerspeaker, and Currents, there was hardly a single song I felt belonged in the trash bin.
The Slow Rush was the first Tame Impala album that contained songs which failed to grow on me over time. Yet, it had enough compositions that I considered career highs that I was more than happy to speak favorably of the project. “Lost in Yesterday,” “One More Year,” “On Track,” and “Patience” (technically a song from The Slow Rush B-Sides & Remixes), were among my favorite that Parker ever put together.
Coming from most bands, having a lovable song or two is enough for me to call an album a relative success. It’s a given with many artists that the majority of their albums’ material will serve as filler — mere ornamentation around the tracks that are true headliners. At worst, they’re undeserving passengers in vehicles solely designed to carry the songs that artists earnestly want to share. Even The Beatles have a healthy reservoir of offerings that I doubt its members could bear listening back to. But Tame Impala was more careful than that. It was by design that his finished products felt mastered to a point where they were all but irreproachable.
Returning to my video game analogy, I think much of the reason that I’m especially disappointed by bad movie sequels, run-on TV shows, and artists that can never recapture the allure of their original releases is that, in theory, it shouldn’t be such an unattainable feat. More often than not, video game sequels enhance what made their predecessors great, grow from the criticisms they receive, and refine the qualities that fans love. But in other forms of media, incremental improvement is a rarity that’s as confounding as it is tragic.
Tame Impala’s first few albums were lightning in a bottle, and by all appearances, Parker was the rare artist who could continue along the trajectory he established for himself. What’s disappointing about Deadbeat isn’t that it’s a terrible album; it isn’t. What’s so disappointing is that it fails to channel or improve upon anything that characterized his earlier work. There’s no sense of learning from his missteps or developing on what people loved.
Had another band released Deadbeat, I’d praise them for the few songs that I found catchy enough to revisit. But coming from Tame Impala, the hit-to-miss ratio on display in this new project is so uncharacteristic that it raises questions. It isn’t just the kind of music on display that’s a disconnect. Parker is talented enough to make death metal sound lush.
Pivoting so dramatically toward dance music could have gone over incredibly if his staple passion had been a part of the project. I don’t think it was completely absent as he put together the album, but in Deadbeat, it no longer seems like the guiding force. The pathos and emotion that defined “Alter Ego,” “Apocalypse Dream,” “Music to Walk Home By,” and “Why Won’t They Talk to Me?” scarcely surfaces. “The Less I know the Better” and “New Person, Same Old Mistakes” were songs that proved that Parker could thrive in new terrain, and that trend continued throughout much of The Slow Rush.
Yet, by all appearances, this new stage of life has struggled to elicit that same, raw creative energy from Parker. Deadbeat isn’t bad, but it’s certainly not the Tame Impala I know.
While "Deadbeat" isn't as compelling or wondrous as Tame Impala's previous albums - seriously, how could anything compare with the brilliance of "Currents", which blew me away at first listen - it's still a pretty decent record. But I agree with you that after hearing "Deadbeat" all the way through the first time (though I'd already heard "Loser" and "Dracula"), I was left feeling a bit underwhelmed for many of the reasons you mention. It's growing on me though.