Lonerism

Kevin Parker started recording this album almost immediately after mixing the first one, before Innerspeaker had even been released. He had bought a collection of synthesizers and was so absorbed in making electronic music that he assumed it would become something else entirely, a side project or songs to give to someone else. By the time he realized he had moved beyond the sound of his last record, he had most of an album.

Parker is Tame Impala. He writes, records, performs, and produces every note. For Lonerism, he split his time between a home studio in Perth, one of the most geographically isolated cities on earth, and a rented space in Paris, where he found Parisians uptight and self-absorbed in ways that fed directly into the album's sense of watching everyone else from outside the fence. That image became literal: the cover photograph, taken by Parker himself at the Jardin du Luxembourg, shows a crowded park through iron railings. Everyone on the other side is enjoying themselves. Parker is not on the other side.

The music sounds like the inside of a very pleasant spiral. Everything is treated, processed, and layered until guitars don't quite sound like guitars and drums seem to breathe. "Apocalypse Dreams," "Mind Mischief," "Feels Like We Only Go Backwards," and "Elephant" are four songs that each do something different with the same palette of warm psychedelia and barely-contained melancholy. Parker recorded ambient sounds throughout Paris and Perth with a dictaphone and wove them into the record as texture. The album was Grammy-nominated and made Parker one of the most in-demand producers in modern music. None of that changed what it is: a record about being alone, made almost entirely alone, that sounds like the most vivid possible version of being inside your own head.