Deadbeat - Tame Impala

By Lucy Kerr

Is it possible to take a completely riskless risk? Tame Impala’s latest album Deadbeat would seem to prove the answer is yes!

Deadbeat feels like the total marker of Kevin Parker embracing a sound that he has been increasingly drawn towards but hasn’t fully committed to on previous Tame Impala albums. In the rollout of Tame Impala’s latest album since 2020, Parker announced that the project was heavily inspired by “bush doof culture and the Western Australia rave scene.” While previous Tame Impala albums have woven in electronic and dance music elements to build a very layered and atmospheric signature sound, in Deadbeat Parker commits fully to exploring this sound, and this sound alone. Despite the premise seeming a promising opportunity for Parker to produce an album that pushes him out of his comfort zone, any attempts at substantively exploring this new style felt hollow as I listened to this album. Instead of trying to experiment with this electronic dance influence, it seemed like Parker just took the elements of this genre he was already familiar with from previous Tame Impala tracks and decided to make an entire album out of this limited and now unoriginal sound.

To give Deadbeat credit where credit is due, vocally Kevin Parker sounds as strong as ever. His high airy vocals have always created a satisfying juxtaposition with the dense instrumentals, and this remains as true as ever on this album, even as the instrumentals change.

This album is far from unpleasant; it’s mostly inoffensive, with a few danceable tracks. The thing is: it’s just so inoffensive, it’s forgettable. It’s so unobtrusive it never sparks any real excitement. It’s so repetitive it becomes background noise. On my second listen through the album I started to think that it may actually make great study music: looping, gentle beats to motivate me to keep working while posing no risk to possibly distracting me from the task at hand.

However, certain tracks are undeniably catchy. Standouts I found myself going back to were the opening track “My Old Ways”, and the third track “Dracula”. Yet even these most engaging singles go on for long enough and get so repetitive that they drag at points. With that being true of the album’s best tracks, it's unfortunately unsurprising that the rest of the record mostly melted together into a jumble of repetitiveness.The few moments I found myself rewinding a song to hear something again was usually to make sure I had heard the half-baked lyrics correctly (after confirming I had heard “you’re a cinephile, I watch Family Guy” correctly on the second track “No Reply”, I started to have a sinking feeling about the rest of the album’s lyrical potential).

Beyond the two previously mentioned early tracks, there were a few other songs, such as “Ethereal Connection”, that stood out among the album’s banality that momentarily drew me under the impression that they could have potential. However, even these songs ultimately dragged and repeated themselves too long to be properly entertaining. They went on too long, repeating too little, that they made any kernels of interesting musical potential feel beaten to death (maybe that's where the albums title comes from…) and ultimately suffocated any sense of originality that they may have teased at certain points.

Tame Impala trading catchy guitar riffs to pursue equally catchy electronic loops is not a negative thing in itself (although I may generally prefer his earlier style). If anything it should be a good thing that Parker isn’t stuck making the same music he was making in the early 2010s. Fans who only want Tame Impala to make albums that sound like Currents should probably reevaluate why they want to doom Parker to such a monotonous and stagnant career.

At the same time, if an artist has found a successful niche in an industry in which it’s so hard to build a fan base and stand out, any deviation from said niche is a risk. And when an artist takes that risk to abandon their niche only to make one of the most inoffensive, least sonically risk-taking albums I’ve heard this year, listeners are left to wonder what the point was. 

My disappointment with Deadbeat isn’t that Parker deviated from his signature style, it’s more so that in doing so, he lost almost all of what made his music unique, and instead made an album that sounds like so many other generic albums of this decade. In an age of popular music that can at times seem to have an increasingly homogenous sound, artists willing to take risks and experiment with new sounds should be exciting. However, an artist taking the risk to stray away from the hallmarks of what’s always made their music enjoyable and kept fans singing their praises for over a decade, only to end up with an album that feels indistinct from other recent generic dance hits feels like more than a little bit of a let down.