In albums leading up to 2015, Parker managed to remain somewhat shrouded in effects and lush atmospherics, providing him with ample places to hide. Songs made for stadiums or Coachella-headlining festival slots were slotted in with cuts custom made for bedroom listening sessions, and any hint that there might be another ‘Elephant’ or ‘Solitude Is Bliss’ on the cards was firmly quashed. Soul, funk, jazz, hip hop, disco, indie and more are all swirled into the pop melting pot Parker was brewing. While deeply personal, he still manages to create enough space for his listeners to inject their own lives into each song, and by doing so created a record that allowed him to connect on a level he had never quite before with his fans.įrom experimental trips like ‘Gossip’ or ‘Disciples’ to songs Parker had no idea would be so successful like ‘The Less I Know The Better’ (which would go on to take out triple J’s Hottest 100 of the Decade in early 2020), Currents is a melting pot of so many different sounds. From the devastating lament in ”Cause I’m A Man’, to the forlorn anxiety of closing song, ‘New Person, Same Old Mistakes’, his lyrics might almost err on wallowing if it weren’t for how expertly universal he manages to keep them. With his lyrics, Parker put his personal life front and centre for all to see. ‘Yes I’m Changing’ and it’s swooning hook bled into the stuttered grooves of ‘Eventually’ as Parker opened up in a warts-and-all approach for his songwriting.
Coming out just a month after Jamie xx‘s In Colour, Parker now found himself operating on the same level when it comes to creating and using space in his productions, creating entire soundscapes with painstaking precision. From the odyssey of ‘Let It Happen’ into the one-two punch of ‘Nangs’ and ‘The Moment’, the sheer level of meticulous sound design and production on display was unrivalled not just in previous Tame Impala records, but among Parker‘s peers too. The 8-minute epic heralded in not just the album, but a new era sonically and personally for Tame Impala. He’s always loved pop, but on Currents, he was done shying away from it.įrom the opening notes of ‘Let It Happen’, Parker makes a bold statement that this time, things are different. He and the rest of the Tame Impala live band covered Outkast’s ‘Prototype’ for their 2013 Like A Version, and unsurprisingly when he returned two years later for the same segment, he chose Minogue’s ‘Confide In Me’. Prior to Currents, he appeared on the pop behemoth that was Mark Ronson’s ‘Uptown Special’, and in 2012 he told Pitchfork he’d written an entire album’s worth of songs for Kylie Minogue. The pivot to pop music didn’t surprise keen Parker fans. This was the time where the mainstream was tapping into alternative spaces, and alternative stars were finding homes as newly minted superstars in their own right. Ariana Grande was working with Cashmere Cat. Rihanna would go on to Tame Impala from this very album. Kevin Parker was producing for Lady Gaga. It was the start of Kevin Parker‘s open embracing of pop, his deep dive into the world of electronic music, and the pioneering record that would see hipsters everywhere realise finally that pop isn’t a dirty word after all. Currents wasn’t so much a third album, but the beginning of something else entirely.
In his review for Pitchfork, Ian Cohen wrote, “he question of whether Currents is better than his first two albums is beside the point: it stands completely apart.” And this is true. Now, five years later, Currents still holds up as one of the best albums of the 2010s, remaining as relevant as ever in a time when the entire world faces its own reckoning too. A maximalist, disco-leaning, pop record and a deeply personal reckoning with the demise of a relationship and his life as he knew it, Parker might’ve felt more lost than ever before when making this album but by releasing it, he would find his place in the world. The album that spurred this on was his 2015 opus, Currents. Titled The Slow Rush, it was a soundtrack for a leap into the unknown, and the culmination of five years of rapid change Parker experienced as he went from an alternative psych-rock loner to one of the most in-demand producers and collaborators in the world. In February 2020, KEVIN PARKER released his fourth Tame Impala studio album. Five years of Tame Impala’s ‘Currents’: The album that made Kevin Parker a legend
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