The Anxious Return of Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker

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Kevin Parker did not take his beta-blocker this morning. He downs one most nights before he walks onstage with Tame Impala, the Kodachrome rock band he started two decades ago in a squalid house in Perth, Australia, the most remote capital city on earth. The pills help him forget his nerves for those all-important first five minutes, to break the cycle of anxiety that leads to sweaty palms and butterflies that lead to evermore anxiety. And he takes them before big interviews, too, like the one we did yesterday at Little Dom’s, an Italian restaurant in the hills of LA’s Los Feliz that, like Tame Impala’s earliest music, provides the illusion of being imported from another era—vinyl-lined booths, wood-panel walls, black-and-white portraits of silver screen stars—while still feeling new. Parker spends part of the year nearby, and this place is a favorite. A month or so earlier, Parker had finished Deadbeat, Tame Impala’s fifth album and the first since 2020’s audacious and discursive The Slow Rush and since he became a father. This would be the first time he’d explained Deadbeat to anybody—the first time he’d sat down for an extended interview about his own songs in nearly five years. He had been nervous for days, he admitted, asking his handlers if I’d heard Deadbeat, if I even liked it. So he popped his morning pill. “Better living through chemistry,” he said in our round booth, his grin a little cherubic and his cheeks a little ruddy as he hoisted his second Negroni of the day and tipped it toward me. But for three hours on that beta-blocker afternoon, Parker and I barely talked about Deadbeat, or even about the present. We talked, instead, about the past—about his parents’ divorce soon after he was a toddler, about their neglect when he was a teenager, about the time he realized the only friend he had might be the music he made by himself. “This is all part of the vault of the Parker family history,” Parker, 39, said as the sun finally started to flirt with the horizon. “It’s crazy that you managed to find these two years, the worst two times of my life. Everything else has been pretty good.” A day later, he shows up ready to talk about the rest. “I was pretty reflective when I got home last night, like an emotional hangover,” he tells me soon after he sits down at a shaded corner table of a sunny Silver Lake bar. He pulls off his sunglasses and orders a cocktail. He looks comfortable, in an old T-shirt pocked with holes, baggy brown pants, and cheap blue flip-flops. He sweeps his shoulder-length brown hair across his unshaven face. “But I feel okay this morning. I wasn’t anxious yesterday, so no beta-blocker today.” This morning, in fact, he instead made two tweaks to Deadbeat’s masters, making the drums on “Afterthought” slightly snappier and boosting his background vocals on “Loser.” This was, of course, a morning in mid-August, and Deadbeat had been at the pressing plant since May 30, after he’d flown to London to hear it mastered for the second time. The vinyl version will be different from the streaming one. Parker minds imperfection more than the discrepancy. “Every album I’ve finished because I ran out of time,” he says, grinning. “There’s always something to be doing, you know? I like to tinker all the time. But the last six months of working on the album was maybe the most intense six months of work, maybe in my whole life.” He begins to tell me about what made the last two years of making Deadbeat so hard—the late-night benders in two rented California beach houses (one of which nearly burned), the longtime buds he brought to his own beach house far outside of Perth for disappointing sessions he abandoned, the Sisyphean sense earlier this year that he would always be done at the end of the month only to watch another page drop from the calendar. There were, he admits, very long gaps in the process—six months, even—when he wondered if he’d ever write another song he actually liked. And then, of course, it would happen. “It’s a high, a euphoria, filled to the top with self-confidence,” he says, leaning in close. “All my shortcomings, everything I hate about me, it evaporates. None of that matters, because I have just made this thing, and that’s all I need. It’s, unfortunately, short-lived.” In the past 15 years, arguably no other rock musician has straddled multiple worlds quite as well as Parker. Tame Impala began as a modernized psych-rock band with exploding-world drums and skyscraping hooks that made it clear Parker also loved pop, soul, and hip-hop. As Tame Impala has steadily morphed into something stranger and self-renewing, where spoken-word stories about picking up laundry led to late-night confessionals, Parker has become a key collaborator to some of the biggest stars in the world. He cowrote most of the tracks on Dua Lipa’s Radical Optimism, helped pen Lady Gaga’s “Perfect Illusion,” and worked with Pharrell Williams and the Weeknd on a Travis Scott song. Earlier this year, he won a Grammy for a song he made with Justice. That’s only a sample. He is also married to someone he met when he was 12. They have two kids, Peach and Rose, and homes on two continents. He is the number-one ticket holder for his local Australian-rules football club, the beloved Freo Dockers, and even wrote their stadium-size, hair-metal hype track. Late last year, he launched an electronics company, Telepathic Instruments, whose flagship keyboard, Orchid, is a compact wonder meant to make production accessible to anyone with time to twist its 11 dials. (Kid Cudi plays it on his recent song “Submarine”.) And he collaborated last year on a collection with A.P.C. When I point out that he’s carrying a shirt he helped design for the French fashion house, he demurs in the self-effacing way that characterized so much of our talks it became an inside joke: “You’re going to laugh at me when I say this,” he says, laughing himself, “but I didn’t even design it. I just said, ‘I like it.’” Parker’s past, I steadily came to realize, is never very far from his present. The ways he learned to feel about himself as a kid—doubted, anxious, cast aside—are the qualities that have made him such an idiosyncratic songwriter and producer, locking himself in a room and steadily warping the edges of a half-dozen genres until they bleed together and he finds something that thrills him. He pretended he had a rock band for years while actually making all of his music himself, in part because he didn’t want to be too vulnerable in front of his best friends. He takes beta-blockers before shows and interviews, in part because as a child, he worried so much about the way others would perceive him he would vomit in the shower every morning before school. He is trying to claim all of this on Deadbeat, a record not only of neon synthesizers and raw drums but also of unflinching self-acceptance. When he repeats “I’m a loser, baby” during Deadbeat’s second single, “Loser,” it’s less a nod to Beck than a nod to his own self-perception. “Deadbeat is a feeling of being behind the eight ball in life and in the world, of not being able to get your shit together, of being an inferior human—an inferior human,” he says, really leaning into that last part. “And that’s depressing until I wear it as a badge, and then I feel good about it, stronger. If I can walk into a room of people and they know that I’m a deadbeat, that I’m a fucking piece of shit, then I’m going to have a better time. The expectation for me to be the guy with his shit together is gone.”

When Parker was 10, he found his first musical ritual. Every afternoon, when school was over, he’d rush home and slip his copy of Korn’s Life Is Peachy into his mom’s hi-fi system. The album had come out in the Australian spring of 1996, and it electrified Parker when he heard it at a friend’s house. He would crank the volume as loud as it would go and let those songs—“Good God,” “No Place to Hide,” “A.D.I.D.A.S.”, bludgeoning and belligerent all, but intricate, too—pulverize him for three hours, turning it off just before his mom, Rosalind, arrived home at six. At night, he would sit in his bedroom, listening to the Smashing Pumpkins. “It was just like medicine for how I was feeling, the antidote,” he says, glancing down at his first Negroni and fidgeting with a bracelet on our first day together. “It was just the way everyone sang in the ’90s, right? That whole negativity about yourself? I don’t know how much of that I was actually feeling, but by the time I listened to it, it felt like the answer.” Parker doesn’t remember his parents as a couple. He believes his first memory might be the day they split, when his mom scooped up Parker and his older brother, Steve, and carted them to the home of the man who soon became his stepfather, Tony. His parents had both been married before and had an affair so intense they bailed on those relationships, married one another, and had two kids. “I’m never that outraged at people who have affairs,” he says with a soft smirk, “because I’m the result of one.” At least at first, Parker’s parents’ story was neither atypical nor tragic: As their passion slowly faded, they realized they were very different people—Parker’s father, Jerry, a CFO for a gold-mining business who believed in saving money, and his mother, who craved adventure. She cheated, Parker says, and soon Parker’s father swallowed his pride and started a new life in a posh part of town. As a kid, Steve remembers, Parker was both industrious and imaginative, spending hours shaping intricate Lego landscapes. “He was the ambitious, creative one, just building these monstrosities,” Steve tells me from his home in London. “It was not just the creativity. It was the determination, the amount of time he would spend doing this and the mental capacity it involved.” Parker remembers the way those Legos made him feel, the pride that came with creating something out of almost nothing. Around the time he discovered Korn, he found that same creative feeling behind the drums. His mom enrolled him in a long-running after-school program in Perth, Andrew Teo’s School of Music. Drum lessons were on Wednesday afternoons. On Saturday mornings, the program would sort kids into ad hoc bands, with Parker joining a new singer, guitarist, and bassist every weekend. “Sweet Child O’ Mine” was the first song he learned, “Are You Gonna Go My Way” the second. He was hooked. His mother turned a backyard shed into a little music room with a drum kit. “I lived for Saturday mornings, could not wait for Saturday mornings. I did not need anything else,” he says. “I couldn’t believe I was in a band. It was surrealistically cool, like I was in a movie. I felt like I was in Empire Records.” He wasn’t content just to play covers with new kids every week. Without knowing they were from Australia, Parker had also fallen for Silverchair, drawn to how much the words and images conjured by three teenagers in a rock band seemed to echo the way he had begun to feel. “I had Nevermind, which I loved, but I liked Silverchair better,” he says. “They were so young that the music made sense to me, lyrically.” He and two pals at the after-school program started their own band, a trio, like Silverchair. He wrote his first song, “Bad Mood.” He’d never resented his parents’ divorce, because it was the only reality he had ever known. But adolescent unrest was beginning to creep into Parker’s life, anyway, and he loved that he had this outlet that sounded, at least in his mind, a little like Life Is Peachy and Silverchair’s Frogstomp combined. The nameless trio recorded “Bad Mood” at the music school, and Parker kept the lyrics in his pocket, showing anyone who paid attention that he’d written a song. “I can’t believe I’m talking about ‘Bad Mood’ in a fucking interview,” he says, leaning over his drink as he chuckles. “It was a 10-year-old making hard rock, all the angst a 10-year-old could have. But it was more than a bug. This was my calling, you know?” Others didn’t share that enthusiasm. Soon after he cut “Bad Mood,” Parker asked to leave Inglewood, the middle-class neighborhood where he lived with his mom, and stay with his dad and Steve, who had mostly been together since the split. His father lived in Cottesloe, a relatively luxurious part of Perth along the ocean. Parker immediately didn’t fit in. “Where I came from, no one gave a fuck about what you wore. No one gave a fuck, because it doesn’t matter what you wear,” he says. “Suddenly, if you weren’t wearing the top surf brands, you didn’t fit in. They knew I was from Inglewood. That was a lot for me to take on.” Someone in his new school also knew about “Bad Mood” and that he had a cassette of his first song. They encouraged him to play the tape for the entire class. Talk to most any Australian long enough, and they will invariably mention “tall poppy syndrome,” a reflexive societal habit in which anyone showing even a glimmer of pride is cut back down to size. This was Parker’s first experience being the tall poppy. “By that point, kids are starting to become aware of being cringey. If you do something out of whack, you get pushed back. They just didn’t get it,” he says, alternately tugging at his stubble and gouging his right cheek with an index finger. “To this day, that’s one of the most traumatic experiences of my life.” Not coincidentally, that was the year he developed the stutter that still pops up if he tries to speak too quickly. And though he wouldn’t know what to call it for a quarter-century, that’s the moment social anxiety rushed into his life, too. “I’ve had it basically from the moment I walked into the classroom in my new school in year seven,” he says. “Basically every uncomfortable moment mentally, spiritually, that I’ve revisited since then is, like, ‘Oh, that was anxiety. You were anxious.’” He desperately wanted to keep making music, but no one in his new school seemed to understand that ambition. His dad, though, had been a hobbyist, a fan of early rock and roll whose interests stopped just before psychedelia began. Though he wasn’t active in bands when his kids were young, he kept instruments around the house. Parker remembered watching Steve play drums into a microphone and then playing the sound back. Would it be possible, he wondered, to do that, then play bass (which he didn’t really know how to do) along to that sound on a second cassette? He stumbled into rudimentary multitracking out of shame and social anxiety. “It was such a magical discovery for me, because I didn’t need to convince those guys in my classroom to be in a band with me,” Parker says. “They didn’t even like me, anyway.”

By the time he was 14, Parker had finally found a life at his dad’s place. He had friends in school now, including a classmate named Sophie Lawrence. Her father had died of cancer when she was six, so she and Parker shared the bond of an atypical family. They spent hours trading messages on ICQ and writing one another long emails, gossiping and commiserating, but they never dated. What’s more, Parker was picking up every instrument his dad owned, learning them one by one. He taught himself guitar by studying online tablatures, beginning with Silverchair’s major bummer and minor hit “Abuse Me.” Steve noticed that his brother had transferred his boyhood enthusiasm for Lego empires to making music. “He went from drums to guitar and then started bringing it all together, really composing things,” remembers Steve. “He wasn’t selling records at 13, but it was like, ‘Oh, he’s got a gift.’’’ And then, when he was 14, it all vanished. Though they’d barely interacted for a decade, his mom and dad had decided to try again. They bailed on their spouses—Parker’s stepparents, whom he’d grown to love—and rented a house together, bringing together a family of five for the first time, including Parker’s younger sister, Helen. “We’d never said ‘Mum and Dad.’ We’d always said ‘Mum and Tony,’ ‘Dad and Rhonda,’” he remembers, referring to his stepparents. “Suddenly we were saying things like ‘Mum and Dad,’ which was not part of my vocabulary.” Steve was enthusiastic, because he’d been old enough to remember his parents as a pair. Parker didn’t like it, how they had again upended everything for what seemed like a lark. His dad seemed desperate to reconcile, since his mom’s affair had wounded him so deeply. (“He was from that generation where you just push it down,” says Parker.) Just when round two started to seem real, though, it also collapsed spectacularly, with both parents returning to the spouses they’d just abandoned and asking for forgiveness. This is where an ordinary divorce and an awkward reunion turn tragic: Neither parent wanted the brothers to come back home with them. They needed to repair their marriages after their failed rumspringa, and they believed two teenage boys would just get in the way. “Left in the middle was me and Steve, and we basically had no place to go,” says Parker, spinning his Negroni and looking up from the table to make eye contact. “My dad said they couldn’t take us, and my mom said she couldn’t afford it.” Their mother eventually relented, but with an extreme caveat. Rather than live in the house itself, the boys could live in the garden shed that had once been Parker’s music room. It was a 200-square-foot space, Steve remembers, separated from their stepfather’s art studio only by thin fiber walls. It was big enough for two single stretcher beds, so close together they nearly touched, and a little TV. The toilet was in an outhouse, and the shower was in a laundry room attached to the main house. The boys had strict access to it for one hour each day, starting at 7 p.m. Life got gross. “In some sense, Steve and I were like a united front, just brothers trying to make sense of this chaos and this really difficult time,” says Parker. “But, as teenagers, we turned on each other, too, always trying to one-up one another. It became a bit Lord of the Flies.” Parker beams when he tells me about a laundry rack he made out of a broomstick and two fence posts to dry his clothes in the shed. It was a link to normalcy and hygiene when there were few others. His grades cratered, as he mentally checked out of classes and responsibilities. He and a friend, Aedan, began meeting in a park near the shed, drinking as much white wine as their teenage bellies could hold before they barfed. “We were just getting obliterated, and I loved it,” he says. “That was just my M.O.” The brothers tried to keep their heads down and deal with the weird circumstances, to treat these strange quarters much like they had treated the divorce and the reunion and the second split—simply their momentary reality, an extension of their parents’ own bad decisions. “We’re two teenage boys,” Parker remembers. “We’re not really geared to worry about not being wanted. We’re just trying to get by.” Eventually, though, Parker broke. He remembers brushing his teeth in the laundry room during the allotted hour one night and wondering, suddenly, why his family life was such a disaster. He’s never cried so hard before or since. A few weeks later, their mom had gone out to dinner. They were waiting for her to come home, so they could access the shower before going to bed. Around nine, when she still hadn’t returned, Parker realized she had parked down the street and snuck into the house, so the boys wouldn’t see her arrive. Parker stormed inside and exploded, demanding that their living situation change. Nothing did. After a year, the brothers moved back in with their father and Rhonda. School administrators took mercy on Parker, because they knew about the turmoil. They let him retake an exam so he could join an advanced math class alongside his friends. The heavy boozing stopped, since his dad and stepmom were the kind of parents who’d at least want to know why he was disappearing into a park late at night. “I was drinking beers with my friends, like a common, regular boy. By that point, I welcomed structure and discipline,” he says. “So by the time high school ended, my life and everything in it had cleaned right up.” His dad had bought a new computer, too, putting the bulky old Compaq, complete with primitive music software, in the garage alongside the instruments. After that, “I had free rein just to record whatever I wanted,” Parker says. “I would make song after song after school.” His dad warned him against trying to make a life of music, but soon bought him a Boss BR-864 8-track, anyway. When Parker was living in the shed, he was still writing songs with a guitar and sometimes a small practice amp. There had been no way to record them, no other instruments to learn. But it became a critical moment of motivation, an epiphany about exactly how much he needed this outlet. “It was my way out. I’m talking about ambition. The idea of me becoming successful would immediately fix everything that was wrong in my life, the things I was insecure about and having a hard time with,” he says, staring at me without blinking, a smile slowly stretching across his face. “Music was always there, no matter what—family, school, alcohol, whatever. It was always the thing that was going to rescue me.”

Jay Watson thought he was joining a band. As a teenager in Northam, a country town of a few thousand an hour north of Perth, the drummer had a rock group of his own—the Novocaines, named for the first Kings of Leon EP. They’d been asked to open for a new group from Perth called the Dee Dee Dums at the town’s PCYC center, a booze-less community space for kids, like a cross between a YMCA and an American Legion. The guitar-and-drums duo, Watson remembers, sounded “90% like Cream.” He loved it. He went to as many shows as he could and became a casual friend. The Dee Dee Dums had gained some local momentum, too, placing in local battles of the bands and getting steady gigs. When the band needed yet another new drummer, their guitarist, Kevin Parker, asked Watson if he would do it. Watson soon moved into a band house they called Troy Terrace. It was so crowded with musicians that the singer Nick Allbrook lived in a shed while Watson took up residence in a living room that doubled as a practice space for a series of overlapping bands, including the Dee Dee Dums, Allbrook’s Mink Mussel Creek, and what eventually became Pond. Watson soon learned that, though the Dee Dee Dums looked like a band onstage, it was really Parker working alone in his bedroom. “I was young and precocious, always like, ‘Let me do stuff,’” says Watson. “Kevin was always open to ideas, never like, ‘This is my thing.’ But 19 times out of 20, they wouldn’t make the cut. It took me a while to accept it was his thing.” This was, Parker remembers, one of the most comfortable periods of his life. Yes, his little share house in the suburbs was overrun with musicians and gear and pretty filthy, but his responsibilities were nearly nonexistent. He’d followed his dad’s life plan by going to college to study engineering, but he dropped out after a little more than a year. He and his friends sat on the porch, smoked weed, and listened to music, then went back inside and made their own. “I found my gang and disappeared off the face of the earth,” he says. “I didn’t really go out meeting people. I didn’t go on dates, you know?” Parker loved the idea and act of being in a rock band, whether that meant doing covers with pals or rehearsing their songs. He’d never felt more confident socially, locked in with friends and playing something that already existed. Despite the convivial setting, though, he would steal away to his little bedroom with his Boss 8-track when the jamming was done, building songs of his own. He remembered, after all, how “Bad Mood” had gone. “The idea of showing a room full of people me working on my song—and singing to them—is a nightmare,” he says. “I’ve never enjoyed conveying emotional ideas I’ve had in front of other people.” The driving rock of the Dee Dee Dums steadily gave way to something more supple and expansive, and he knew he needed a better name than some onomatopoetic homage to the sort of group Phil Spector might have produced. Tame Impala was born in his Troy Terrace bedroom. But he believed that having a band onstage—and maintaining that illusion offstage—meant that others might take him more seriously than if he presented himself as another solo producer making hooky bedroom rock, especially in that moment just before chillwave crystallized. “It didn’t make sense to people listening to it that it could just be one person,” he says. “It seemed absurd for people to know it was just me.” Glen Goetze didn’t care who was making the songs he was hearing. By late 2007, Goetze had been at the Sydney-based indie label Modular Recordings for six years, rising from intern to A&R guy, helping founder Steve Pavlovic scout bands. They’d had success with Cut Copy, Wolfmother, and Ladyhawke. “There are only four or five major markets in Australia, and you can only play those so many times a year,” Goetze tells me from a porch on Nantucket. “It was important for what we did to be part of a global conversation—and vindicating for our bands to feel like they were being positively received internationally, not just in Australia.” Goetze, though, had no idea that there was an active music scene in Western Australia, a place he’d never visited, until he stopped by a Sydney record store and bought a disco single from a Perth label called Hole in the Sky. He went to the MySpace page of the band who made it, clicked through their Top 8, and beckoned his roommate as soon as “Half Full Glass of Wine” by a band called Tame Impala began playing. Goetze immediately sent the band a MySpace message and asked if there was more music. After a few exchanges, he called Parker and invited Tame Impala to Sydney to play in a small bar, The Excelsior, near the Modular office. They were crusty kids from an oceanside city on the other side of the country, Goetze remembers, so parochial that someone had apparently bought Watson flip-flops just so he could get on the plane. Goetze wanted them anyway. “We’d already done Wolfmother, but [Tame Impala] seemed cooler. It was retro, but it had the potential to be more than that,” he says. “It was the first thing I’d come across since working at Modular where I thought, We have to do this. We moved quickly.” Parker had just gone back to school to study astronomy. He was a few months into the term when the contract arrived, and he never returned. Modular signed Tame Impala as a band but released Parker’s bedroom recordings from Troy Terrace as an EP that October. The label presented Parker with a host of marquee producers for Tame Impala’s debut album. Why not Liam Watson, who had worked on the White Stripes’ Elephant, or Gustav Ejstes, from the Swedish psych band they all loved, Dungen? Modular even offered to fly Tame Impala somewhere fancy in the States. Parker declined it all. He didn’t want to go to a studio, because he’d heard other young bands do that and have their eccentricity picked clean. The music that had attracted Modular was made with an 8-track and headphones, so why change now? “Just find me a shack on the beach,” he told the label. Turns out, there was a legendary and ramshackle studio and house on a hill overlooking the ocean, far south of Perth on a western tip of Western Australia. It was called the Wave House. The label recruited an engineer, and Parker arrived with his 8-track, intending to make his debut album there, almost entirely alone. He didn’t bother telling Modular that last part. “The place I’d come from was pretty un-luxurious, and here was this amazing, isolated place,” says Parker, smiling. “I did that sort of starry-eyed thing: ‘If I ever get any money, I’m going to buy this place.’”

When Sophie Lawrence was 25, she left Perth for London. Her relationship with Parker had been complicated since they were 12, since the day they first saw each other at their school’s outdoor lockers. Nearly 30 years later, she still remembers his black Russell Athletic shirt. They’d become so close that, when they graduated, she printed two years of their formative emails to one another and bound them together for him, a diary of their friendship. But they’d never dated or even talked about it much, since both of them were never simultaneously single. “There was definitely something there,” Sophie tells me. “But I didn’t want to ruin a friendship, ruin something so special.” The two remained close after school. She was a fan of his bands who bought all his early music and distinctly remembers the day her mom told her Tame Impala signed to Modular. When things went badly for Lawrence at work, she’d go to his place and unload. On one of those visits, Parker played her a working version of a song called “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards,” a chiming tune about a situationship that seems forever stalled. “I thought, Oh my God, this is one of the best songs I’ve ever heard,” she says, smiling. “It wasn’t until years later I thought, Oh, that might have been about me.” But by the summer of 2011, when Lawrence was already living in London, she and Parker hadn’t seen one another for months. Not only had Innerspeaker, the astounding debut he’d made at Wave House, exploded soon after its 2010 release and transformed Parker into a sudden star, but he’d also moved to Paris to live and work with his French girlfriend, the musician Melody Prochet. Lawrence didn’t think anything of it when she headed backstage at the Roundhouse in June 2011, the band’s biggest London show yet; she and Parker had always hung out together, even when they were dating other people. “I got told by a security guard I couldn’t go back. And then I was told he didn’t want to see me,” says Lawrence. “I was just like, ‘Fuck that guy. He thinks he’s all that after playing a sold-out show at the Roundhouse.’ We didn’t speak for two years. I didn’t think we’d ever speak again, honestly. I thought our friendship was over.” Parker was on a balcony smoking as all this unfolded, and he saw Lawrence storm down the street. He wanted to call out to her, but he worried it would cause trouble with Prochet, who was standing right beside him. (The tension, he admits, also distracted him from Noels Fielding and Gallagher, both in attendance.) “It was a really sad night for me, because I wanted to see her, just as a friend,” Parker says, sighing. “But that wasn’t going to happen without multiple times more drama.” Lawrence didn’t listen to Lonerism for two years, didn’t even hear the song written about her in its finished form. But by the end of 2013, they were both back in Perth and, more or less, single. When Parker texted her for the first time in years, she didn’t respond for days, finally doing it only when she realized she would see him that night at their high school reunion. “That whole night was just us speaking, catching up on two years. He explained to me what happened in London, that it was a difficult situation,” says Lawrence, who has been Sophie Lawrence Parker since 2019, when they got married. “And from then on, we were just kind of inseparable.” The relationship, Parker tells me, stemmed in part from his burgeoning self-esteem. “I’d been around the world a few times,” he says with a mischievous grin, maybe the most brash thing he says to me in seven hours of conversation. “I had a ton of confidence by then.” On the other hand, nascent fame had cast him out of his Edenic early-20s existence at Troy Terrace. He could feel his social anxiety floating back to the surface, as he tried to handle what he calls a “cool band-guy lifestyle.” He was expected to be the life of every party, a role he’d have to drink himself into playing. It didn’t come easy. He was known to cower behind his manager while meeting important people, like a kid being introduced to strangers by their parents. “It was like, ‘Oh, fuck, I feel worthless again. Why am I not enjoying this?’” he says. “The other guys were having a great time, so why was I having such a hard time? I had successfully managed to ignore that stuff for all those years.” The familiarity of Parker’s relationship with Lawrence arrived at an opportune time, then, as Parker’s career was about to expand in an unexpected—and, at times, uncomfortable—direction. In the early days of Tame Impala, before Innerspeaker was even released, the superstar producer Mark Ronson had become a fan of Parker’s work. Another young Australian band, Danimals, had won a contest to have Ronson make music with them, and they played him Tame Impala’s debut EP. “Those vintage fucking breakbeat drum sounds?” Ronson tells me as he begins his morning walk on a Chateau Marmont treadmill. “I loved it.” Ronson and Parker finally met in 2011, when Australia’s massive Future Music Festival linked them with the likes of MGMT and Kesha for a tour of the country’s five major markets. Parker and Ronson became fast friends, nerding out nightly about snare sounds and microphone placement. Parker played him a working version of Lonerism. In October 2012, a few weeks after Lonerism was finally out and charting in a dozen countries, Ronson saw the band at Brixton Academy, their first London show since Lawrence wasn’t allowed backstage. There was a big afterparty—“everyone from Kate Moss to Kasabian,” as Ronson tells it. By the end of the night, Ronson and Parker were floating. “Kevin goes, ‘Man, we should do a project about the funk. No one’s really putting it down for the funk, and funk is kind of like a dirty word now,’” Ronson remembers of their wasted hang. “He’s like, ‘Let's do some shit.’ I knew what he meant—groove music.” In 2014, as Tame Impala still toured Lonerism, Parker made the arduous flight from Perth to Memphis to spend four days with Ronson at Royal Studios, where Al Green had made his hits. They ate fried chicken every day and built the core of Ronson’s 2015 album, Uptown Special. Parker didn’t write the album’s famed anthem, “Uptown Funk,” but Ronson believes that their soused conversation in London may have planted the idea. Ronson remembers watching George Clinton on the side of the stage one night, beaming and pounding his foot as he played “Daffodils,” one of the songs he’d made with Parker. He knew they’d fulfilled their mission. “Kevin has said on a number of occasions that coming to work with us on Uptown Special was his first time ever collaborating, that it helped him understand how to become a producer and work with people,” says Ronson. “That’s like Jimi Hendrix saying, ‘Oh, yeah, that guy gave me my first guitar pick.’ I’ll fucking take it.”

Parker and Lawrence were in bed, about to turn off the lights in Perth, when Rihanna came calling. Actually, the call was from Jodie Regan, who’d been Tame Impala’s manager before Parker had even adopted that name. She first encountered Parker’s extended circle of “barefoot, long-haired, music-playing” friends after she began booking the Norfolk Basement in Fremantle, Perth’s countercultural cousin, nearly 25 years ago. Though she didn’t yet understand that managing bands was a job, she became the de facto manager for lots of them, even attending a workshop about the business by John Butler, the guitarist and songwriter who had gone from busking in Fremantle markets to big international tours. On January 14, 2016, Rihanna’s manager Jay Brown—a cofounder, with Jay-Z, of Roc Nation—called Regan in San Diego with a rush request: Rihanna was days away from finishing her eighth album, Anti, with plans to release it in two weeks. She wanted to add one more song: a cover of Tame Impala’s “New Person, Same Old Mistakes,” the finale of Parker’s third album, Currents. To pull it off, Brown said, they’d need the sound files, or stems, for the original song immediately, perhaps even that day—and they couldn’t tell anyone. Regan texted Parker, who got out of bed and got straight to work. “Because Kevin does everything by himself, mixing and whatnot, he doesn’t always have the stems readily available. He hasn’t made them, so it can take a bit of time to get those things together,” remembers Regan. “Jay hassled me six times during the day. I got them to him 24 hours later.” Aside from Rihanna’s voice, the biggest change to the original was its name; Rihanna shortened it to “Same Ol’ Mistakes” but kept Parker’s original track largely intact. It was a frame-shift moment for Parker, much more than the Ronson collaborations that were already out, because it suggested that the way he thought about and composed music by himself could suit the most celebrated stars in the world. “Same Ol’ Mistakes” was nearly three minutes longer than anything else on Anti. Parker had made it that way. “I’m just this girl from Fremantle, and it felt big to have this big-time person call me up, in a professional sense,” Regan says. “And it felt huge for Kevin, because Rihanna’s so fucking cool.” Seven years earlier, when Parker was making Innerspeaker mostly alone with his 8-track at the Wave House, he used Regan’s laptop to imitate a synthesizer. (He bought his first actual synth after the album was finished.). When he flew to Sydney to play the album for Modular, Goetze remembers hearing the record’s final track, “I Don’t Really Mind,” and noticing the way that laptop-synth sound danced with the drum machine. The kid who talked about Turkish psych-rock one minute and Kylie Minogue the next suddenly made a lot more sense. “It maybe wasn’t the best track on the record—last track, recorded very late in the process, dinky drum machine and heavy-handed synth stuff,” Goetze says. “But it suggested where things could go in the future. It felt like this could only be the beginning.” The pop inclinations Goetze had detected were now coming to pass—and Sophie Lawrence had unintentionally ushered them along. When she and Parker were kids, she was what she calls a “2000s R&B girl,” and she’d stuck with it. When they started dating in 2014, she played Parker Tinashe’s Aquarius and her classics—TLC, Brandy, Timbaland. (She later walked down the aisle to Aaliyah’s “At Your Best (You Are Love).”) “That was outside of his world, and it was really fun, seeing him discovering something and going, ‘Oh, fuck, this is good,’” Lawrence says, laughing. “And it used to make me feel good, not like a loser, for loving great R&B. I was very proud.” Around the time of Rihanna’s album, Ronson summoned Parker to Malibu, where he was working on Lady Gaga’s Joanne. Parker showed up with the chorus for a song called “Perfect Illusion,” and Gaga responded immediately. As they worked, Ronson would suggest edits to Parker’s idea, like a lyrical tweak or a sonic shift to make it more commercial. Parker rejected them all. His commitment to his original idea impressed Ronson. “He was present, and he held his own,” Ronson remembers. “There wasn’t this thing where he was the weirdo in the corner who just came out to say something. He started to realize this is what it’s like to be in a room with other people.” The credits started mounting: a cascading rap track defined by his insistent drums and hazy sense of space, featuring several of music’s biggest stars, including Travis Scott and the Weeknd, over a sample from a 2016 jam with one of his heroes, Dungen guitarist Reine Fiske; a crackling New Wave love song cut with Theophilus London; a piece of shimmering disco as bright as the noonday sun, made with Diana Ross and Jack Antonoff. Watson remembers being surprised that the friend and bandmate who had always worked alone seemed so good at this kind of collaboration. “He’s always been quite awkward socially,” Regan remembers wondering, “so how’s he even going to communicate with these people?” It hasn’t always been easy, and it hasn’t always worked. Parker tells me he has had to white-knuckle his social anxiety, learning to push it aside so he can engage with those around him. Lawrence remembers him coming home from early sessions dejected and trapped in his own head, even relative to his obsessive approach to making Tame Impala records. The failures have been motivational. “In the early days, it was my friends who were making better music than me. I just wanted to make music as good as my friends,” he says. “And now, if I feel like I’m the weak link in a room of other producers and songwriters, I’ll come away from that feeling like a piece of shit. That inspires me.” For Parker, these collaborations offer an opportunity to experiment without the expectation that he make something that sounds like Tame Impala’s past. When Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay, of Justice, flew to Los Angeles to work with him on their album Hyperdrama, they had a song they wanted him to sing. They played him six tracks anyway, to see if something else appealed to him. Parker spotted the obvious pick right away, and asked if they could try something different, so he could make a song that didn’t sound like Tame Impala. The obvious number became “Neverender,” which went on to win a Grammy; the other, “One Night/All Night,” stretches, scrambles, and then buoys Parker’s voice in ways that feel novel. Like Parker, Augé and de Rosnay have mostly kept their process as Justice sealed off from outside input. They were surprised by how natural and easy working with Parker felt. “It took us maybe half an hour to break the ice completely, and then we really felt like just three guys in a band together,” de Rosnay tells me. “Sometimes you just have to listen to something on loop for an hour, and then something comes up. That never felt strange.” The pinnacle of all this for Parker, at least so far, was Dua Lipa’s Radical Optimism. Lipa built what Parker sees as a dream team, four songwriters and producers who would show up every morning ready to pursue a new idea. In a string of two-week sessions, Lipa was the spiritual force, creating an atmosphere where everyone became a torrent of ideas. So much of his session work had been in-and-out situations, a few days at most when the pressure to get a good idea was high. They had time, he says, to go deeper. He’s made so much of his own music by stumbling blindly onto a sound or a hook; this was an intentional hunt for them, and he felt like he had the skills and experience to help. It was the closest thing he’s ever had to a job, let alone one he loved. “The atmosphere in the room was so positive, so constructive,” he says. “I went to the studio each day feeling like I was in the Beatles, just like, ‘What’s going to happen today?’ I knew it was probably going to be something magic.” Lawrence says she’s never seen Parker return from sessions so happy and confident, feeling not only like he was contributing but also that he was learning how to lead a team and becoming a better producer by doing so. “Something that he’s always wanted to prove to himself is that he can write a great pop song,” she says. “Even though he’s proved that he can, he still thinks he’s on that pursuit. It’s one of his holy grails.”

In July 2020, four months after Australia closed its borders amid pandemic restrictions, Parker finally made good on his old starry-eyed dream: He bought the Wave House. The idea had loosely been on his mind since he made Innerspeaker there more than a decade earlier, so he plopped down nearly $3 million for 47 acres of forest and shore alongside Injidup Bay. Wave House became his artistic retreat. “LA is the middle of everywhere, and Wave House is the middle of nowhere,” he tells me as servers buzz through this LA bar, carrying trays of cocktails. “I go there by myself for a week, two weeks at a time to reach complete isolation, completely cut off. It’s Soph’s worst nightmare to be alone like that, but it’s like a meditation retreat for me. Bliss.” There is a natural amphitheater behind the house itself, the space created by the ceiling of a cave that collapsed long ago. In the ’90s, it was a legendary party outpost for the Western Australian music scene; Parker beams as he flips through flyers on his phone for all-night raves and shindigs there with names like Earthstomp. “The whole place was just so interesting then—bought by this mysterious American guy who built this fantastic house on top of a hill on top of a cave,” remembers John Butler, the Fremantle guitarist. “You’d hear all kinds of stories about it.” When Parker would sit in the amphitheater alone, on steps cut into the grass, he says he could sense those stories. He would dig in the topsoil and find decades-old glowsticks or spy the toilets that had not really been in service since those wild days. He began to imagine the music that might have ricocheted across the limestone, the techno that would have soundtracked the weekend-long outdoor raves that Australians call “doofs.” He wanted to make that kind of music himself. Parker had been drawn to techno as a kid; it had the same immersive quality that drew him to psychedelic rock. But he remembers Steve mocking him for liking a trance track in a music store once, right around the time he made “Bad Mood.” None of his friends seemed to like dance music, either, so it became something of a secret fascination. “Nothing transports me like techno music,” he says, smiling and waving his arms. “It makes me feel like I’m not physically where I am right now, like I’m in outer space.” He remembers trying to explain to people that the Chemical Brothers had inspired some of the rhythms on Innerspeaker, only to be met by blank stares. “That didn’t fit the picture people were trying to paint,” he says. “But as the years have gone on, I’ve realized more and more I don’t care about that shit.” So he started running drum machines through guitar amplifiers, using whatever methods made sense to him even if he reckoned that wasn’t how actual techno artists might do it. He felt like an imposter and a dilettante, doing rudimentary imitations of the things he loved. His inabilities and insecurities were, once again, helpful. “So much of my love of techno comes from my frustration of not being able to do it,” he explains. “But as long as I enjoy that process, I do it.” He was convinced for at least a year that he was going to release a set of techno recordings, likely under an alternate name or anonymously so that people would come to it without the baggage of Tame Impala. (“It wasn’t for commercial gain or, like, ‘the artistic journey.’ It was just to fucking do it.”) But then he started to sense he was getting good at it, or at least that the music he was making gave him that same out-of-body experience that he’d had listening to Paul van Dyk remixes or sets from another favorite, Brazil’s Wehbba. He decided to shelve the project. He was, after all, starting to think about Tame Impala again. When he was working on The Slow Rush, he’d rented a spot in Malibu so close to the shore that “the sound of the waves would come through the microphone.” This was in 2018—the most destructive California wildfire season on record up to that point. After a late night spent working, Parker woke up to an evacuation order. The entire place burned. In August 2023, he decided to try again. Not long after the Lipa sessions were finished, Parker rented a house in Montecito, 100 miles up the coast from his place in Los Feliz. Parker had a routine: In the evening, he’d have a spliff and a few strong drinks, then stay up as late as possible looking for a hook. As the night progressed, he’d often text Lawrence photos of himself holding joints and a glass of wine, like proof of process. He’d done this while writing Currents, too—renting the Wave House, getting loaded on gin and weed, and working until he hit oblivion. But as the end of the week neared, he had nothing he liked, and he was trying to fend off thoughts of doom. When that happens, he begins to worry he’s just a producer for pop stars now, no longer a songwriter for himself. But he suddenly imagined a little melodic line he loved, the pre-chorus for a song he eventually called “Dracula.” “I was shaking with excitement, quivering,” he says, singing it to me in a nasal tone. “I rolled a spliff and walked up the beach to think about it more, got back to the place, and tried to record it. It felt like, ‘Oh, fuck, it’s happening.’” Parker had been listening to Thriller a lot, thinking about the post-disco successes of, say, Quincy Jones. He thought that’s how the album might sound. But that image slowly darkened. The drums should be rawer, he realized, the synthesizers bigger. He wanted to make, he says, the dance-music equivalent of the Strokes’ Is This It, where each song felt like an instantly identifiable piece of some cohesive whole. He started routing drum machines through amps again, letting them distort until it sounded like a cheap PA blasting Nigerian boogie. As summer neared in Australia, in December 2023, he called a dozen friends from Tame Impala’s touring incarnation, and Pond, and asked them to meet him at the Wave House for two weeks. For the first time, he wanted to make a record together, as buds and as a band. It was, almost immediately, a disaster. “I’d been doing these LA songwriting and recording sessions, where everyone is desperate to get their ideas across. I was hoping for that kind of energy with my friends,” he says, sighing. “But they were a little bit confused about what was supposed to be happening. I guess I saw myself as a little bit of the Mark Ronson type, but that work is quite difficult, even though they’re all my bros.” Everyone left after a week. Parker was disappointed in himself and his expectations, how he hadn’t considered the demands that asking his friends to come up with Tame Impala parts on the fly would create. It just wasn’t the vibe. Watson tells me it wasn’t a big deal, that he never expected what they played to become the Tame Impala album anyway. But for at least two prior Tame Impala albums, Parker had talked about not sequestering himself to make the next one. He’d now tried and failed, and he knew he’d have to descend once again into the maddening and isolated studio world of Tame Impala to make another record. “Maybe I can do better next time,” he tells me, as if plopping himself back into an infinite loop, “and create an environment that feels better.” When I tell Ronson about the comparison and the dejection Parker felt, he tells me that’s sweet but misguided. “We all have grass that is greener. I thrive on collaboration, and I know I bring a lot to the table,” Ronson says. “But I also know that it’s good that I’m not Shuggie Otis, Sly Stone, D’Angelo, Kevin Parker, whatever the stereotype of the mad genius you want to be. You can’t be a genius and a diplomat.”

Late into our second day of very long conversations, on that afternoon of no beta-blockers, I ask Parker what he’d celebrated lately. He looks out over the bar’s patio with the concern of some frontiersman scanning the horizon for predators. He says “Uhm” for so long I think he might be humming to me again. “Well, there are often things to celebrate,” he finally allows, pausing again as if he’s counting them. “My son was just born. Oh, and I won a Grammy.” Rose, as he and Lawrence nicknamed the boy, was born in mid-May, two weeks before Parker turned in the vinyl version of Deadbeat. It was one of the busiest periods of Parker’s life. The Grammy was for that Justice song he originally passed on, “Neverender.” (He’s been nominated for Best Alternative Music Album three times but never won.) When I ask him if he went to the Grammys ceremony, he scoffs and waves his hands in front of his body, like I’m dousing him with poison. He was in Perth with Lawrence, who was six months pregnant. “I’ve never had so many messages on my phone, though,” he says. “But the way my mind works, when something good happens, my brain immediately starts looking for ways to discredit it. So in the case of the Grammy, I won a Grammy, but it wasn’t my song. I just sang on it.” This is the part of the celebrity profile where the triumphant strings are meant to come in, where I’m supposed to tell you about all the ways Parker has overcome his childhood trauma and vestigial self-doubt and sometimes-crippling anxiety. And in terms of what he’s made—a family, a career, a relative fortune—Parker has indeed overcome so much, his life an oxbow flowing toward possibility. None of that, however, has made him easier on himself. “I know that everyone that sees me and my life and my career thinks that I am the furthest thing from being a deadbeat, because I’m successful,” he says in a rush. “But the more success that I have, the more I feel like I’m living a lie. It’s a sham.” He cackles like a henchman. I ask him about the title of Deadbeat and the photo on the front—him holding Peach, his daughter, and adorably nuzzling her. He’s already told me that he worries he has missed too much of her childhood, whether on tour or locked away in the Wave House or some coastal Los Angeles rental. Does he worry that people will think he’s calling himself a deadbeat dad? Is he that self-critical? “I’m a workaholic and not always there as much as I’d like to be, but I don’t consider myself a deadbeat dad,” he says, an assessment Lawrence will later echo emphatically. “I just had that word written in my notebook, and it just felt so warm and comforting for the world to know that’s how I see myself. That feeling has always been something I tried to run away from.” I wonder, then, if he’s ever been to therapy, a notion he’s rejected in previous interviews. He grimaces and admits that, while making this record, he got so stoned during one of his creative benders that he spiraled into an existential panic. Nearing 40, he knew the pattern wasn’t sustainable forever, so he asked for help. He went to therapy twice and not only hated it but felt that it might be bad for the music he makes. “I decided to deal with it myself,” he says. “I’ve always been tempted by the idea of therapy, but I’ve always thought that, if I did therapy, the music wouldn’t have as much purpose. People around me have always been amazed by how steady I have been, how unfazed I have been by the family stuff I was telling you about. Part of that is just having that outlet of music.” Tame Impala albums have, indeed, always felt like exhalations, like Parker is breathing the troubles in his head into tunes the rest of us can carry for him. Where “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” was about how many times he fumbled his chances with Lawrence, “Posthumous Forgiveness” was about reckoning with his father’s neglect and letting it go. He was his own brutal critic about his breakup with Prochet on Currents, an arbiter of his own quest for stability on The Slow Rush. Deadbeat feels like a last act of resignation and acceptance, with Parker finally coming to terms with the person he has always been and may always be. On “No Reply,” he apologizes for ignoring his friends to watch cartoons, for staying in when he knows the proper thing to do is go out. On “Afterthought,” he is suspended in an emotional stalemate, wondering if he can be more than he knows he is. A thread of teenage romance winds through so many of these songs, too: the wistfulness of a man nearing middle-age looking back with wonder at what was. Nearly a month after Parker released the album’s first single, “End of Summer,” he changed the streaming credits to “Loser,” which happens to be the name of Deadbeat’s second single. The artwork for “Loser” is just a photo of Parker at 16, eternally awkward a year or so after he moved out of the shed. He laughs hard when he shows me that photo an hour after we first meet; over the next two days, it becomes clear to me that Parker hasn’t entirely outgrown that kid, either. I finally remind him of the time back in the shed when he decided music and success might fix everything. Did it? “At the end of the day, it’s all a Band-Aid, no pun intended,” he says, laughing at himself. “It smooths the problems over for the time being. But I have no idea what kind of person I would have grown into had this not all happened.”

PRODUCTION CREDITS: Photographs by Jason Nocito Grooming by Candice Birns using iS Clinical Special thanks to Karolyn Pho, stylist to Kevin Parker