tame impala and the new cool

On Tame Impala, Dua Lipa, and drugs

Kevin Parker. Credit: Julian Klincewicz

“I was in LA a few years ago, and for some reason, we’d taken mushrooms. I was coked up as well, and a friend was driving us around LA in this old sedan. He was playing the Bee Gees, and it had the most profound emotional effect. I’m getting butterflies just thinking about it. I was listening to ‘Staying Alive’, a song I’ve heard all my life. At that moment, it had this really emotive, melancholy feel to it. The beat felt overwhelmingly strong and, at that moment, it sounded pretty psychedelic. It moved me, and that’s what I always want out of psych music. I want it to transport me.” - Kevin Parker, NME (2015)

I.

On March 10, 2020, days before the pandemic shuttered live music, I saw Tame Impala, the music project of Kevin Parker, at The Forum in Los Angeles. It was obvious that this was probably a bad idea. The television series I was writing on at the time had already moved to a virtual room. Every conversation I had with friends involved either canceling plans or forging ahead with plans, knowing that this was the last time we’d be gathering. At least, for a while (oh, the days when we thought this shit was gonna last a few weeks at most). But I’d already attended my sister’s wedding in Florida the previous weekend and hadn’t gotten sick, so I decided to chance attending.

The Slow Rush, released a month prior, had quickly become one of my favorite albums of the year. It had the same Tame Impala sound, but it was funkier, it was groovier. Whereas you might listen to Parker’s previous albums by smoking a blunt or doing some shrooms, The Slow Rush said, take a lick of molly and dance. I did just that in the Uber en route to The Forum with a friend, only to realize that my StubHub-purchased tickets were not digital and I had no way of retrieving them from home (I’d recently moved; if they were mailed to me, they were at my former apartment). My friend and I were already high as hell, and we’d done blow in the car too, so leaving the venue was not an option. We found last-minute tickets online, nearly twice what we’d originally paid during the concert presale, and hustled into the venue minutes before the show started. Our original seats were on the floor, but the only ones left were in seats far from the stage. As it turns out, that was probably our saving grace; other friends who attended and were on the floor got COVID that night.

When the pandemic forced a lockdown, I danced alone to “Borderline” and “Breathe Deeper” in my apartment before we started creating “pods” and hanging out with the same small groups of friends. The album was in regular rotation, alongside Lady Gaga’s Chromatica and Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia, at our late-night dance parties that lasted through the next morning. Dance parties fueled by “ketamine, coke, and molly,” to quote Amaarae’s “Starkilla.”

Deadbeat, Parker’s latest album, is a return to the dancefloor that eluded The Slow Rush. The pandemic prevented Parker from having his dance floor moment, so now he’s leaned into being a DJ and making club tracks. No shit. Who hasn’t had at least 10 friends become DJs since the pandemic? Every friend who’s sent me a text about how much they love this album has been in the club with me before.

Pitchfork’s review references the NME interview where Parker describes falling in love with “Stayin’ Alive” all over again on shrooms. It leaves out the fact that Parker was not just on shrooms. He was also doing blow! He’s not just making music to listen to while high on the couch. As Whitney Houston once said, “It’s about the clubs. Clubs are happening. Like you know, people, the gay community keeps them happening. It’s where they go to release.”

“Ethereal Connection,” my fave track on the album, sounds like you might hear it in the studio at Basement or a multitude of underground dance parties in Brooklyn. The propulsive eight-minute track takes you on a journey from ordering doing bumps in a bathroom, ordering drinks at the bar, joining your friends at the front left speaker, making out with a stranger, offering them a bump, then locating your friends to do it all over again. “Afterthought” is reminiscent of disco tracks like Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell,” something the DJ might drop to reinvigorate the crowd at 6 AM. “Piece of Heaven” is the song that plays when you have a heart-to-heart with your best friend or the person you’re falling in love with, where you come away reassured that the mess you’ve made out of your life will soon pass. And even if it doesn’t, “there is much pain in the world, but not in this room.”

II.

The critical consensus has not been kind to Deadbeat. A lot of people think the album sucks. That Parker has moved too far from his indie rock roots. I saw a (presumably straight) man post online that Parker hasn’t made a listenable tune since Currents. It reminds me of Parker’s last major release, which was his Dua Lipa collab Radical Optimism. The critical and online gay consensus was not kind to that album.

The debut single “Houdini” was well-received. “Training Season” less so. But “Illusion” was a certifiable banger. Fans thought the rest of the album was going to sound like that. And why wouldn’t they? Lipa claimed the album was inspired by Massive Attack, Primal Scream, and UK rave culture. Plus, she gave us the definitive pandemic dance album Future Nostalgia, another record thwarted from its place on the dance floor thanks to COVID. I think everyone expected a similar-sounding follow-up.

The thing is, the album might not sound like Future Nostalgia, but it does sound like a Dua Lipa album. As a pop star, she’s not the best dancer. She was famously mocked for her dancing early on, which she clearly corrected by taking dance lessons. When she debuted “Don’t Stop Now” at the 2019 MTV EMAs, her dancing was a huge improvement over what I’d seen at the tour for her 2017 self-titled debut.

Lipa is also a good singer, but she’s not Ariana Grande. The thing about her is that she's just cool. She is forever on vacation. She reads books. Like, legitimately reads books and interviews authors like Percival Everett, Helen Garner, and David Szalay for her Service95 Book Club. These are legit books, mostly literary fiction, not Oprah and Reese Witherspoon fare. And did I mention that she’s always on vacation??

Most of the critiques of her album were some form of, “she probably recorded this damn album on vacation.” But to me, that’s a positive, because it sounds like a vacation. People were expecting another club banger nation album, but Radical Optimism is the kind of album you make when you’re drinking Aperol spritzes on yachts and dancing on the beach with Jacquemus. I am doing neither of these things, but it sounds perfectly lovely while doing prescription ketamine spray in a pool on Fire Island.

III.

Last week, Kevin Parker attended Vanity Fair’s party at Le Dive for Charli XCX’s November 2025 cover. He’s one of the cool kids now. I mean, he’s always been cool adjacent. Rihanna covered his song “New Person, Same Old Mistakes” as “Same ‘Ol Mistakes” on 2016’s Anti, but most people barely know the original. He produced Lady Gaga’s “Perfect Illusion,” but only diehard Gaga fans appreciate it (I love it).

But now that he’s embraced making music for the club, Parker is only going to get more famous. Since the beginning of time, fame erodes coolness to your core fan base. XCX fans are already annoyed at her soaring ticket prices, the neverendingness of Brat, and fears that she’s going to be overexposed with the 9,000 movies she has coming out soon.

It’s a natural backlash to poptimism, which operates under the assumption that music must be good if it’s popular. Kalefah Sanneh wrote, “How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge,” for the New Yorker, which longs for an era when music critics used to be meaner. For the record, Sanneh is the one who wrote the infamous “The Solo Beyoncé: She’s No Ashanti,” so he’s to blame, too. But he’s also right. Rolling Stone and The New York Times dropped their glowing reviews of Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl the second the album was released. Presumably, to get a bunch of clicks from Swifties who are used to critics trashing their faves’ albums. A phenomenon which began happening less and less, because they’d attack music critics for daring to dislike an album that sold millions! How could you hate a #1 album? IDK, do you like the Transformers movies?

When I was a teenager, before stan culture turned listening to music into a consumerist game, you had to defend your taste, not how many records your favorite album sold. It didn’t matter if critics liked it or not, either. So maybe it’s a good thing that Tame Impala’s album is a critical failure. I’m once again in the position to defend my taste. Which feels kind of cool.