The Anzac Day performance and a spot on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert where Parker sings The Slow Rush gem “Is It True” on a split screen, supported by himself on guitar and bass, reveal a noted perfectionist loosening up in quarantine. Parker broke his natural routine of splitting time between homes in Los Angeles and Perth to effect a sort of endless summer to shack up in the Australian winter, where he figured he’d be the safest.
As COVID-19 began to ravage the world and, by extension, the music business, Tame had to rethink a North American arena tour arranged around headlining slots at New York’s Governors Ball (canceled) and Tennessee’s Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival (postponed). Two months later, Parker found himself performing “On Track” from a couch on an acoustic guitar for Music on the Home Front, a concert for Anzac Day, Australia and New Zealand’s annual military veterans’ celebration. The new music dispensed new maturity the songwriter learned as a married man, having wed his girlfriend, Sophie Lawrence, in 2019, in the same cautiously optimistic terms he used to talk about anxiety on earlier works. It would take another year for February’s The Slow Rush to see release, thanks to Parker’s high standards and his habit of playing all the parts. Demand for a new Tame album was met last spring with the release of the singles “Borderline” and “ Patience,” where the last album’s disco undercurrents became the main stream. Parker popped up in the credits of Lady Gaga’s Joanne (as co-producer on the single “Perfect Illusion”), Kanye West’s Ye (“Violent Crimes”), and Travis Scott’s Astroworld (“Skeletons”). Rihanna repurposed the album closer “New Person, Same Old Mistakes” for her 2016 album ANTI. Tame Impala crisscrossed the world behind Currents, creeping up font sizes on festival lineup posters as the months became years. Currents is one of the great headphone masterpieces of the 2010s, bending genres and mainstream musical conventions to serve its purpose. His Everyman struggles, coupled with a flair for white-hot grooves indebted to ’60s and ’70s blues and psych-rock titans like Blue Cheer and Led Zeppelin and a sleepy but tuneful singing voice that drew endless comparisons to the Beatles, attracted a strong base for Tame as Parker gigged around the world with a dedicated touring band.īut it was 2015’s Currents and its Zen dance-rock opener “Let It Happen,” a sage synthesis of locomotive beats and druggy atmospherics, that introduced the band to a new audience. Kevin Parker songs are excursions into the inner reaches of a worried mind. In a decade, the psychedelic rock torchbearer and musical flagship of Perth, Australia, polymath Kevin Parker blossomed from renown at home and among indie-rock fans in the know to its current status as one of the Western world’s must-see festival closers, adored by hip-hop and rock fans, by pop and independent music fans in equal measure. Tame Impala makes music about learning to adapt to life’s changes. Photo-Illustration: Vulture and Photo by Venla Shalin/Redferns/Getty Images
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