Kevin Parker has made some tweaks to the aesthetic of his Tame Impala music over the years, but Deadbeat is one of his pivots yet, as the project is more heavily indebted to dance music than anything he had done before. This had been a long time coming, as for years, dance music was a “guilty pleasure” for him, he revealed.
In a new interview with Russh, Parker said:
“It’s always been a love of mine, even before it was obvious, even before it was imaginable that I could make that kind of music. It was a guilty pleasure for so long. I came from the rock world, you know, where anything that wasn’t guitar-based was ‘less than,’ you know? So yeah, this time I just thought, f*ck it.”
He also spoke about the meaning behind the album title, saying, “[‘Deadbeat’] was just a word I’d written down in a notebook. I stumbled across it weeks later and had no idea why I’d written it. […] It just spoke to me. It felt perfect, despite the negative connotations. Someone disconnected. Someone lost. When I realized how many of the songs carried that energy, it just… fit. […] The word ‘beat’ being right there. It felt right, like drawing a circle around everything. A word that holds the chaos together.”
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