Deadbeat by Tame Impala // Album Review
The album opens with "My Old Ways", which goes on to truly set the tone for the entire project. Opening with just a raw demo vocal before moving into an expansive, full‑production electronic arrangement fully encapsulates the dynamic of this entire album and the Deadbeat tone to it, which largely goes back and forth between both sides of refinement.
The song's focus lies within his desire to change and evolve, but ultimately always comes back to old habits. "So, here I am once again, feel no good, I must be out of excuses, knew I would, feels like it came out of nowhere this time, wish I had someone else to blame, well I tell myself I'm only human," he sings in the opening verse.
"I just thought it was a good place to start. It just felt like the right way to open up an album called Deadbeat," Kevin said in an interview with Coup de Main. "In a way, it almost felt like a movie - not that this album is in any way a narrative from start to finish, but it's kind of like an 'oh shit, here we go again' moment. I just like starting with: 'Well, fuck...here we are again.'" With such an addicting bridge that is among the highlights of the entire album, "My Old Ways" immediately establishes the emotional and sonic rift at the heart of Deadbeat.
"No Reply" follows, which he wrote from the perspective of his experience in his early 20s; feeling aimless, lost, and avoidant in relationships. It's quite simplistic in terms of production, especially compared to a lot of the other songs he's worked on through the years, but that simplicity is intentional. Some of this track in particular was actually recorded on his phone, which is a testament to just how raw and intimate he wanted this record to be.
"I was just really drawn into sounds that were quite simple and stripped back, and sometimes distorted, sometimes kind of like...I kind of had this fantasy of, if it sounds shitty, then it's right, you know?" he said in an interview with triple j. "I think for someone like me who's sort of always obsessed with the expansive songs and sounds that are like this expansive pop thing, I always just love the really opposite of that. The pendulum swinging the other way is just the opposite of that."
It's especially effective on "No Reply" in the way it presents the deadbeat version of him, or the characterized perspective he's writing from. He has a sort of droning vocal performance paired with honest, self‑deprecating, and at times very funny lyrics. A lyric like, "I just want to seem like a normal guy, you know how it's like, try to see my side, you're a cinephile, I watch Family Guy on a Friday night, off a rogue website," perfectly encapsulates the insecurity and humor of that era of his life.
Deadbeat is ultimately rooted in its singles, especially "Dracula". It was one of the first songs he wrote for the album that massively helped to guide the direction he wanted to take from that point forward with the rest of the project. It's a glossy pop song at it's core, while still being engrossed in psych-rock elements, striking a balance between the two that feels unmistakably like Kevin's signature style.
He started it while staying in an Airbnb on the California coast, and the song feels so representative of that distinct setting. It's truly such a vividly written all-night dance anthem, built around a vampire's aversion to coming out in the daylight and the thrill of letting go of all your cares in pursuit of living entirely in the moment. It also holds such a central point of shaping what the album became. He worked on this - along with a couple of other songs on Deadbeat - with collaborator Sarah Aarons, marking the first Tame Impala tracks since his sophomore album Lonerism to feature a co‑writer (btw...did you know Tame Impala is just one guy?)
Once he got the initial spark of inspiration for the song, he decided to let everything go that he had been working on up to that point in the album process, wanting that moment to be the true launching point for everything else. On the final day of his five‑day stay at the Airbnb, the idea for the song suddenly hit him and everything else seemed to fall into place. "I don't know what was happening, but you know, it happened. I just thought of something and went for a long walk on the beach, smoked a spliff, went back and tried to record it. I was hoping I wouldn't forget it," he said in an interview with triple j. "When songs start happening, it all sort of cascades - a crack will emerge and then everything falls away...things escalate quickly, and that's how you know it's a good idea."
"Loser" follows, serving as the second single off of Deadbeat, and it really embodies everything thematically that the album is made up of and is fully embracing the term itself. It channels a piece of Kevin's past, especially the messiness of his early adulthood, the mistakes he's made, and the ongoing effort to take responsibility for the way he is. With actor Joe Keery acting as a sort of Kevin Parker body double, the music video plays into this idea even further, presenting a heightened, Deadbeat version of Kevin bringing the song's narrative to life in a visual sense.
"I had to tell ya, it's now or never, so much for closure, I lost composure, I get the message, I learned my lesson," he sings in the opening verse. "Tried to correct it, I think I wrecked it, man, it's a crisis, I'm never like this, that's how my life is, you couldn't write this, I'm a loser, babe".
The song focuses on lingering feelings from a past relationship and the regret of knowing he made things worse than they needed to be. Again, it leans into a very self‑deprecating tone, which is a recurring theme of this record. "Desperate times call for dеsperate measurеs," he sings in the second verse. "Tried to correct it, well, shit, I wrecked it".
Instrumentally, it's really eclectic with bits of Spanish‑style guitar woven together with a cool, distinctly 2000s R&B style. That influence pops up several times across the album, especially on other highlights like "Obsolete", which similarly carries a clear Timbaland imprint and feels stylistically linked to "Loser" too. Kevin even cited 70's Turkish music as a major inspiration in a Studio Brussel interview, specifically the work of Barış Manço, an artist known for experimenting across a wide range of genres throughout his career - a lineage that fits perfectly with the sonic patchwork Kevin curates through his own music.
Gems like "Oblivion" and "Afterthought" are two of the record's most undeniable standouts as well. "Afterthought" in particular is driven by one of the most addicting, hypnotic bass lines he's ever written - it truly can immediately join the ranks of his best work to date. Both tracks feel like essential pieces of Deadbeat's emotional architecture and expansion of its sonic palette.
"End of Summer" closes the album, and it also served as the album's lead single. It was the first glimpse into Deadbeat and the world he wanted to create within it. It immediately set the tone for the undertaking ahead, introducing the expansive, electronic direction he would take the rest of the project in. It stretches past seven minutes and gives itself full permission to wander and breathe to the fullest extent.
Thematically, it feels connective to other electronic house tracks on the album like "Ethereal Connection" and "Piece of Heaven", the latter of which also brings so much heart to the album in the same way "End of Summer" does. It also feels linked to "Not My World" as well, which Kevin described in an interview with triple j as the "signature sound of Deadbeat". "It's the one that's like the truest to me because it's so stripped back," he said. "It's so, to me, it's so raw. Like, the first few minutes are like... it's like uncomfortably raw for me, you know?"
The hazy "End of Summer" sits in a deliberate contrast to the tighter, more traditionally polished songs earlier in the tracklist. Deadbeat truly thrives amidst these musical contradictions, though - as best showcased in the variety of the singles themselves. As Kevin said, "I wanted the whole album to sound like 'Not My World', and a lot of the songs did, but then...I sort of saw the value in a song like 'Dracula'. It wanted to be a big pop song, you know, so I just kind of let it."
Allowing space for these long electronic tracks throughout the album - almost all stretching well past four minutes each and many without building to a huge explosive moment like some of his past records - really represents the entire artistic intent behind this project. These songs meander and create a disconnected, immersive atmosphere the listener can escape into. That sense of presence is essential in a club setting too, which directly inspired the album's direction after Kevin spent time DJing. There's a freedom in letting a song build slowly, in giving it room to become a real experience rather than a neatly produced and packaged pop song.
Part of this also comes from him wanting to intentionally push back against the indie-rock leaning perception that dance or electronic music is sometimes seen as "less intellectual" - a hurdle he has spoken about facing when it comes to pop music as well, and the snobbery that can surround certain scenes. Deadbeat rejects all of that, and is a full embrace of every influence at once without hesitation or apology.
"It's the first time I've felt confident enough to do it, and also felt that I had enough space on an album to fill it out with dance music and electronic music and techno music that can go for eight minutes, you know," he said in the same interview with triple j. "I think in other albums I've been so focused on lots of little songs, or just songs that were of other influences. So this time, it was just-like, it was techno's time to shine."
Thanks for reading! Check out more of my favorite albums and songs of 2025 + more Tame Impala reviews linked below. I am also so excited to be seeing the Deadbeat Tour live next week too, which I will absolutely be writing all about here very soon! ★
Photo Credit: Julian Klincewicz, Tame Impala, Columbia Records
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