Tame Impala have returned with ‘Patience’, the first track from the psych rockers in four years. The new offering was released late last night – and it sees the Aussie band experimenting with both nineties house and laid back seventies disco in their first release since 2015’s ‘Currents’. “Just growing up in stages (Lay down no more) Living life in phases Another season changes And still my days are shapeless,” frontman Kevin Parker sings on the new track. Advertisement While fans were expecting new music from the band in 2019, the track’s arrival came with just an hour’s notice. “New track. 1 hour. Speakers/headphones ready people,” the band wrote on Instagram. A release date for the album is yet to be confirmed, but Parker previously confirmed that it’ll arrive at some point this year.<doc-sep>Over the course of a decade and three albums, Kevin Parker has taken his Tame Impala project from small-sounding, Beatles-indebted, pop-leaning psych-rock to big-sounding, ELO-indebted, pysch-rock-leaning pop. “Patience,” Tame Impala’s first single since the release of Currents in 2015, continues this mutation. Unlike the best moments of Currents, however, the song’s crowd-pleasing impulses are not entirely successful, representing the first time Parker’s move toward slicker, dancier sounds has brought about diminishing returns. “Patience” opens with chunky house piano chords, disco synth strings, a loping midtempo backbeat, and some tastefully deployed congas. Just about everything is run through a whooshing space-age phaser, the sole remnant from Parker’s paisley Innerspeaker days. Other than that, it’s a bit like the poolside Spotify pop of Calvin Harris’s last album, but even more self-consciously retro. Parker seems like he has a respectable record collection, and it’s doubtful that he’s actively trying to emulate anyone on Harris’ level. More likely, it’s a case of shared inspiration, digging into the same sparkly-clean ‘70s dancefloor hits and obscurities that everyone else is so enamored by lately. But the difference between “Patience” and a classic like “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” is that one is sung by Sylvester, and the other is sung by Kevin Parker. In the disco era, a lead vocalist was expected to project style, sex, verve, humor, swagger—to give a performance of some kind. (Calvin Harris understands this, and he’s lucky enough to have Pharrell and Frank Ocean in his phone book.) Kevin Parker is not a disco singer. He’s an indie-pop auteur, and a remarkably gifted one: the hooks of “Patience” are as sharp as ever, and they’re likely to sink in after only a listen or two. But the song doesn’t leave you with much more than an earworm. As a vocal presence, Parker is airy and unaffected. On his past records, you got the sense that this mild-mannered studio wizard was singing mostly because the presence of another person would threaten to disrupt the gorgeous and intricate hermetic world he’d constructed for himself. The insularity was part of the appeal—not for nothing is the second Tame Impala album called Lonerism—but as Parker’s pop ambitions continue to grow, it’s beginning to feel more like a liability. A true pop personality could do wonders with Parker’s melodies and arrangements, as Rihanna did with her largely faithful rendition of “New Person, Same Old Mistakes.” It’s not clear, however, that Parker is that person himself.<doc-sep>Prepare to bask in Kevin Parker’s disco dreamscape. Tame Impala have released “Patience,” their first new song since 2015’s masterful pop move Currents. It finds him plunging even further into the synthetic psychedelic realm he explored on that album. “Patience,” which is perhaps a nod to the four-year wait for new music, is a beat-driven, atmospheric soft-rocker that sounds more like easing back into action than a grand epic a la “Let It Happen.” Presumably Tame Impala will perform “Patience” on Saturday Night Live next weekend and at Coachella next month. Will we hear more new music before then? At the very least it seems likely that a second new track will materialize for SNL, but let’s cross our fingers for a full album drop before they arrive in the desert. Hear “Patience” below, where you can also find Tame Impala’s upcoming live dates. Mostly they’re playing festivals, which makes sense given that they’ve become the reigning live band in the major festival ecosystem. TOUR DATES: 04/13 – Indio, CA @ Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival 04/20 – Indio, CA @ Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival 05/02 – Nashville, TN @ Ascend Amphitheatre 05/03 – Asheville, NC @ ExploreAsheville.com Arena 05/05 – Atlanta, GA @ Shaky Knees Music Festival 05/06 – St. Augustine Amphitheater – St. Augustine, FL 05/07 – Miami Beach, FL @ Fillmore Miami Beach at the Jackie Gleason Theater 05/11 – Guadalajara, MEXICO @ Corona Capital Festival 05/25 – Boston, MA @ Boston Calling Festival 05/31 – Barcelona, SPAIN @ Primavera Festival 06/01 – Paris, FRANCE @ We Love Green 06/05 – Gotenberg, SWEDEN @ Garden 06/06 – Aarhus, DENMARK @ NorthSide 06/21 – Sheebel, GERMANY @ Hurricane Festival 06/22 – Neuhausen ob eck, GERMANY @ Southside Festival 06/26 – Pilton, UK @ Glasonbury 08/01 – Chicago, IL @ Lollapalooza 08/09 – Helsinki, FINLAND @ Flow Festival 08/14 – Hasselt, BELGIUM @ Pukkelpop 08/15 – Rennes, FRANCE @ La Route Du Rock 08/16 – Walibi Holland, NETHERLANDS @ Lowlands Festival<doc-sep>New Tame Impala music is on the way. Today the band released “Patience,” their first new single since 2015’s Currents (and Rihanna’s cover, let’s be real) made them arguably one of the biggest rock bands in the world. Since then, frontman Kevin Parker has kept quite busy, collaborating with some of pop and hip-hop’s biggest stars (Mark Ronson, Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Travis Scott, even scrapped Kendrick Lamar and SZA material). Here’s everything Parker’s had a hand in since Currents. July 30, 2015: Fresh off the release of Currents, Kevin Parker joins his BFF Mark Ronson for an appearance on Like a Version, the ongoing covers segment on Australia’s Triple J radio. Together with Aussie goofball rocker Kirin J. Callinan and Miike Snow’s Andrew Wyatt, they do a funky rendition of Queens of the Stone Age’s “I Sat By the Ocean.” The live performance got taken down but you can still listen to ripped audio from the jam session. August 20, 2015: Tame Impala is threatened with a lawsuit by Sam Culley, a member of the ’70s funk group Skull Snaps, who claimed Parker sampled his band’s “It’s a New Day” on the Currents track “Eventually.” (A lawsuit was never officially filed.) November 12, 2015: Donning one of his then-signature skinny scarves (he’s since cooled a little on the look), Parker returns to Triple J for Tame Impala’s Like a Version. The band picks a fellow Australian artist to cover: Kylie Minogue and her haunting, trip-hoppy 1994 single, “Confide in Me.” January 27, 2016: Rihanna releases ANTI, which features a surprise cover of Tame Impala’s “New Person, Same Old Mistakes.” Two days later, the band’s management issues a statement saying that Rihanna’s camp sought approval from Tame Impala before recording the cover. It is revealed several years later that SZA was the one who introduced Rihanna to Tame Impala. “It’s kind of funny, because when I was writing the song, I imagined a female R&B voice singing it,” Parker told Billboard. “So when I heard Rihanna singing it, I was like, ‘Oh, wow, the song is how I originally imagined it.’” February 25, 2016: Tame Impala remix Miguel’s “waves” for a new compilation called Rogue Waves. A couple weeks later, the video for the track comes out, which features Miguel and Parker wandering around introspectively on the beach. (Parker is still rocking the skinny scarf at this point.)<doc-sep>
Photo: Chelsea Guglielmino/Getty Images “Patience” is the most self-reflective Tame Impala single that’s ever been released. It’s not that front man–slash–mastermind Kevin Parker hasn’t always been capable of making these sorts of introspective songs, it’s that usually the first album single from this band tends to veer toward that moment at any given music festival (take your pick — Tame Impala have played and, are now headlining, most of them) when everything comes together into a blissfully psychedelic moment and you realize you’re watching an actually successful Big Deal Rock Band in the 21st century. There will probably be at least a few sort of boring debates about if Tame Impala is even really a rock band anymore. The answer doesn’t really matter, and never really did. The band’s last LP, 2015’s Currents, rocketed Parker into a new music stratosphere. In the years since, he’s acted as a producer for artists like Lady Gaga, Travis Scott, Theophilus London, and more, and had one of his own Currents songs upstaged by Rihanna’s cover of it on her album Anti. Parker is successful, and has ended up in these circles, because he is a studio obsessive, tinkering with intricate sonics and layering tracks like he’s blessed with an unlimited studio budget. His music reads as rock, but isn’t really. Though Tame Impala’s music sounds generally modern, the methods by which it is made and the time it takes to make it are artifacts of an old music industry, and there’s a sort of romance to that. “Patience,” the band’s first song in four years, is as much of a creeper as its title warns. The first time you listen to it, it feels like the kind of daytime poolside track that works well in the background. The second through fifth times (I did not arrive at this number scientifically), the song takes on a level of wistful sadness that all Tame Impala songs tend to have. Parker takes his time to make this music, but is, as a result, obsessed with the passage of time, with the way the world changes around him. That he’s choosing to explore these emotions via musical decadence is interesting. It’s not subversive, really, but that’s okay. Sometimes you just want to be sad about the inexorable passage of time while you’re drinking piña coladas next to an infinity pool, non-infinity pool, or pool on a yacht. (If you somehow find yourself on a yacht in the near future, and you have an opportunity to play this song, the other people on the yacht will probably not be mad. Also, please invite me on your yacht.)