Tame Impala Is an Obsessive, Not a Perfectionist

The magic of Parker’s music—what makes his records so restless, dithery, dynamic—hinges on the minuscule yet crucial difference between perfectionism (endlessly boring) and obsession (endlessly interesting). “Everyone thinks I’m a perfectionist,” Parker said. “That’s the assumed narrative when someone orchestrates a whole album—the Brian Wilson idea. But if people actually saw me in the studio, and saw how little I cared about so many things . . . ” He paused. “On the backs of my albums, you’ll see a photo of a microphone meant for singing pointing at the kick drum, held up with a wine rack. I’ve just never really given a shit about that. I would love for it to sound better, because I respect a lot of big pop producers.” He added, “You always worship what you don’t feel you are.”

Parker prefers to work alone and in seclusion; he often rents an Airbnb close to the beach, bringing any studio equipment with him. For “Deadbeat,” he withdrew first to Montecito and then to Malibu. “I just go straight to the map, and I look at the coastline and find the dots that are closest to the water,” he said. “I don’t give a fuck, I just wanna find where I can hear the waves the loudest.” He’s usually in situ for four or five days at a time. In 2020, he bought a property in Yallingup, near Perth, called Wave House. (Before Parker owned it, he rented and recorded there, making parts of “Innerspeaker,” Tame Impala’s début, and “Currents.”) The house is set on a fifty-acre plot, overlooking Injidup Beach and Leeuwin-Naturaliste National Park. “It feels like the edge of the earth,” Parker said. “It’s this really beautiful place. There used to be raves there in the nineties, in this natural amphitheatre. That was actually a big inspiration.”

Parker said that “Deadbeat” was shaped in part by the spirit of bush doofs, all-night dance parties thrown in rural, off-the-grid locales. “They happen all across the world, but Australia has its own name for them,” he told me. “ ‘Doof’ started as a derogatory word to describe club music, because from a distance all you hear is doof, doof, doof. I’ve always just been super inspired by that scene. Part of my desire to make that kind of music is to transport myself there—to me, that’s musical Nirvana. I got into psych-rock for the same reason. That idea of just endless, hypnotic music that a field full of people can tap into.”

I told Parker that I loved the album’s title, both for its louche, dirtbag implications—an absent father, a lazy employee, a squirrelly boyfriend—and for its literal suggestion of a bad rhythm, a dead beat. “You nailed the duality of it,” Parker said, nodding. “For a moment, I was a bit worried that maybe I had come up with a word that’s too sensitive for people. For me, it’s a feeling. It’s a way of taking something that you were insecure about—a way of seeing yourself that you didn’t like—and glorifying it. ‘Hey, everyone, this is me. A fucking deadbeat.’ In a way, I’ve kind of always felt like that.” He continued, “A lot of this album is inspired by my late teen-age years, leaving high school and trying to become an adult, and not having a very easy time. There was this assumption that I would go off to university and become a part of the workforce. It just didn’t make sense to me, working in an office and having Friday drinks with the other workers in the office, and then, like, going on dates. That’s why I ended up living in a share house with a bunch of other stoners, listening to psych-rock.” He has come to see his divestment from normie culture as a point of both pride and relief. “To put that word on my album cover, I can’t really describe the feeling of how comforting—is it cathartic? Is that the word? Catharsis?” he asked, laughing.

All of Parker’s records have a particular idiosyncrasy, a wobble, a beat that’s not beating. “That’s the ‘Deadbeat’ sound,” he said. “All the drum machines are going through guitar amps. I wanted to make a simple, shabby-sounding album.” Lately, Parker has also embraced the wabi-sabi ideal—that there is glory in irregularity, in something being vaguely misshapen. For Tame Impala’s live shows, he encourages his bandmates (Parker tours with a crackerjack lineup that includes Dominic Simper, Jay Watson, Cam Avery, and Julien Barbagallo) to lean into their flubs. “I started saying to the guys, ‘Not only don’t worry about it—don’t stop yourself,’ ” Parker said. “Even if we shit the bed and the whole song falls apart and we stop—to us, that’s embarrassing, but to someone in the audience, that’s just seeing humans onstage.” He went on, “I make music by myself, so I’ve always been obsessed with this idea of making something that sounds like a hundred people. But I think that somewhere along the way I sort of forgot about the intimacy of it—the value of being vulnerable, of making it really obvious that you’re a human.”