Will we see new music from Tame Impala in 2025?
Tame Impala, the production outfit of Australian psychedelic visionary Kevin Parker, has gone suspiciously silent in recent times. Not since The Slow Rush, coming up on five years ago now, have we been graced by anything in album form, leaving fans and critics alike wondering what could be next in the Tame Impala pipeline. Parker’s not giving away many hints about it, anyway.
As much as their legacy is overwhelmingly dominated by the runaway monster success of ‘The Less I Know the Better’ in 2015, you would actually have to travel back as long ago as 2008 to find the genesis of Tame Impala and where they first laid their roots. Taking a gander through their discography ever since then, it’s clear that Parker and his backing band have never had the next project far from view, hopping from one album to another as deftly as sonic sorcerers.
This elongated quiet period we find ourselves now in, then, takes an ever more serious gravitas in that context. Given that Parker’s land of musical imagination has previously gifted us a world of technicolour ethereality, it seems increasingly worrying with the expanding length of this gap that his sonic brainchild has shrivelled into monochrome mundanity.
Is there any sign to reassure us that not all hope is yet lost? Well, in Parker’s most recent public interview in July 2024, he did promise that new Tame Impala material was on the way, being characteristically elusive when he told The Guardian: “All I can say is that I’m working on it. It’s not finished yet,” though acknowledged, “but I think it’ll be there, soon.”
His concept of “soon” must be quite loose in that case, as seven months on and we’re still yet to hear a peep. The only hope in this situation is that the year is still young, and we surely will be getting a taste of this new project at some point in 2025 – but whether it’s in the near future or in the darkest depths of November is another question.
Of course, Parker is renowned for his meticulous production process, so no matter what’s really going on behind the scenes, this is bound to be a contributing factor to the delay in some form. He has previously spoken of being holed up alone for months on end at home, hitting his head off the brick wall of writer’s block before being invigorated by sudden bursts of energy in which he has created some of his best work. Unfortunately, the desperate need for a divine intervention seems apparent here.
Between previous offerings like Innerspeaker, Lonerism, and Currents, Parker has also taken on further side ventures, turning his hand to movie soundtracks in 2023 with ‘Wings of Time’ and ‘Journey to the Real World’ for the Dungeons & Dragons and Barbie films respectively, before taking on the role of producer and co-writer of Dua Lipa’s album Radical Optimism the next year. As such, if recent trends are anything to go by, Parker’s attention seems to be on projects where he can take a background credit rather than centre stage.
To use the now slightly ironic title of their own most recent album, The Slow Rush seems to have turned into ‘no rush’ as far as new Tame Impala projects are concerned. When we’ll next see Parker and the band back on stage is anyone’s best guess, mainly because it’s dependent on the frontman churning out the tunes first. 2025 may well be the year that the drought will end, but until then, as they put it themselves on Lonerism, it’s going to “feel like we only go backwards.”
