Tame Impala’s new album is a homage to bush doofs

About 250 kilometres south of Perth lies the town of Yallingup. A classic, laid-back West Australian beach town, it’s here that you’ll find Kevin Parker’s Wave House. Surrounded by bushland and overlooking the windswept Injidup Beach, it’s a place that’s meant a lot to Parker for a long time.

In 2009, he rented the house to record Tame Impala’s mesmerising debut album, Innerspeaker. A few years later, he returned to piece together bits of his 2015 record, Currents. He finally bought the house in 2020, along with a few dozen acres of bushland that features a naturally formed limestone amphitheatre.

This amphitheatre has a storied history, being the location of many raves back in the ’90s. After he bought the place, Parker would stand in the open expanse, finding old glow sticks and detritus from parties long past. “You don’t even have to dig for them,” Parker says, laughing over the phone. “You sort of trip over them.”

Parker would spend a long time in the amphitheatre, soaking in the history, imagining the beats bouncing off the rock. In the back of his mind, a new album was percolating. “You can just feel the energy of past raves there,” he says. “It’s really intoxicating because you can almost hear the music. That’s how perfect that space is for that kind of thing.”

Parker is dialling in from Mexico City, where he’s slated to play a DJ set at a secret location. The rollout for Tame Impala’s fifth album, Deadbeat, is in full swing, and Parker is trying to enjoy the ride.

Since the release of Innerspeaker, Tame Impala has been one of Australia’s biggest musical exports. Parker, the sole songwriter and creator, has gone from a sharehouse-dwelling Perth musician to a critically acclaimed, globally respected songwriter and producer.

His work stretches far beyond Tame Impala, with collaborations and credits with artists such as Lady Gaga, Travis Scott, The Weeknd, SZA, Gorillaz and Dua Lipa. He owns a shiny Grammy Award for his work on the Justice track Neverender, and has clocked up numerous nominations along the way.

The follow-up to 2020’s The Slow Rush, Deadbeat started to take form in mid-2023 after Parker rented a house on a Californian beach. He’d done the same for other records, and his routine followed a similar arc: staying up into the dark, early hours, trying to magic a hook into existence.

Deadbeat, Tame Impala’s fifth album, finds Parker going full rave.Credit:

A week-long excursion to Wave House followed, Parker accompanied by some of his Tame Impala touring band and musician mates. After creating four albums in isolation, Parker was determined to open Tame Impala’s world. But the sessions didn’t yield anything.

“The times when I can make music with my friends is such a special time, and it’s kind of everything for me,” he says. “I wanted so badly for it to be able to fit, but what we were doing didn’t fit in.”

Parker realised, once again, that he was on his own. “It wasn’t in any way a sad feeling,” he says. “It was just like, ‘Well, I’m not going to be able to share the load this time. It’s going to have to all be me again’. Which is, at least, simpler in a way.”

With Wave House’s doofs rattling through his head, Parker set about building the propulsive world of Deadbeat. In a back catalogue of great albums, it stands as one of Tame Impala’s best, Parker’s sleek psych-pop arrangements powered by liberal doses of techno and acid house. Take standout single Dracula, with its strutting disco-funk groove and slinky hook.

Or Obsolete, with its deep, hopping bassline lifting up Parker’s vocal as he offers his love to someone in desperate hope they may receive it. He also delivers one of his heaviest dance tracks yet on the techno odyssey Ethereal Connection, which you can imagine thudding around the Wave House amphitheatre. Deadbeat is his homage to those bush doofs.

“I’m in love with the spirit of it and the freedom,” Parker says. “I think that, for me, I’m always chasing that trance-like state with music. Something like a bush doof or a rave… that’s a place that my mind just goes. It captures the spirit and, to me, it’s a pure way of taking in music.”

‘There are times when people stop me in the street for a photo and I’m like, “Why the f--- do you want a photo with this loser?” ’

Such is Parker’s love for techno that he made an entire album of it before Deadbeat, which he’s unsure will see the light of day. “Hopefully something will come of it … When you have things that are known about you, it’s not always easy to set your songs free in the way they want to be. It might have to be an anonymous thing.”

Coursing through Deadbeat, and all of Tame Impala’s albums, are the threads of Parker’s anxiety. The title is a reclamation for Parker, a way to acknowledge and dispel his self-deprecating thoughts. After a decade at the top of the music industry, Parker still feels impostor syndrome pushing on his brain. But lately, it’s getting easier.

“That is something that haunts me and follows me around, just any other bad emotion that people may have,” Parker says. “But for the large part, I’m extremely proud of the music I’ve made. I’m extremely proud of where I’ve gotten. I’m extremely grateful. But there are times when people stop me in the street and they want a photo and I’m like, ‘Why the f--- do you want a photo with this loser?’ And there are some times when I’m like, ‘That makes sense’.”

He laughs. “Then there are times when I’m like, ‘Why aren’t there more people asking me for photos right now?’ It’s a complex thing. But when any one of my songs comes on in public, in a shop or a f---ing restaurant or whatever, I’m extremely proud to be hearing it.”

The other major shift in his mindset has come in the form of his two children, born in the past few years. “Becoming a dad has made me just realise how f---ing unimportant being cool is,” he says. “I’ve never cared less about what people think of me once I had kids.

“My anxiety for proving myself socially has transformed recently. I can walk into a room of people and just be like, ‘I don’t give a f---. I don’t give a f--- if these people like me.’ It’s not always like that, but I handle it a lot better than I used to.”

It’s not lost on Parker that Deadbeat arrives just as he passes the 10-year anniversary of Currents – the massively successful album that changed the course of his life. He looks back on it fondly now, but it was a different story at the time.

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“When these two planets aligned where it was the 10-year anniversary at the same time as Deadbeat … it was like a nuisance,” Parker says. “It was getting in the way, but really it’s helped me remember that even when you feel shit about an album that’s coming out, it could be great. It can be as great as Currents and you could still feel shit about it.

“When Currents was coming out, I was so disappointed in myself,” he adds after a brief pause. “I thought I’d squandered an opportunity to do something good. It took me a long time to realise that when people were telling me they liked Currents, they weren’t lying.

“I know that sounds absurd. It’s hard finishing something and releasing it into the world and feeling good about it. Every time I release an album, I get a bit down in the dumps … so just reminding myself of how that all went down 10 years ago, it’s helping this time.”

Is Parker down in the dumps now? “Well, I’ve done a lot of maturing since then,” he says, happily. “Mentally and spiritually. Every album, I remind myself to enjoy it. If I had one regret about when Currents came out, it was that I didn’t enjoy it. If my past self could tell me something now, he would be screaming at me to enjoy it. Just enjoy it. So that’s the voice I’m trying to listen to, and not the others.”

Tame Impala’s Deadbeat is out on Friday.