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Oct 17, 2025The lyrics of Deadbeat scream essential Tame Impala. Still, there is a simplicity to Deadbeat that has never been a part of the band’s repertoire, allowing Parker’s songwriting to feel new and fresh. .... These twelve songs do more than satisfy Parker’s hunger for something fresh; they establish Tame Impala as an amorphic sonic giant ready to implement their singularity into whichever genre they please.
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Oct 17, 2025Deadbeat starts intimate and confessional, with what might be the best opening track of the year. .... From there, the tracks flow and blend hypnotically, tied together by the piano. Sometimes a song’s coherence is sacrificed to tranceyness, but hooks keep bobbing to the surface like lava lamp bubbles.
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Oct 17, 2025An album that keeps suggesting everything isn’t as it might seem. If it’s occasionally confused, it’s also painfully honest and genuinely wracked: you leave it hoping the man who made it is OK.
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Oct 17, 2025His thoughtful pacing doles out thrilling moments worth waiting for, while the slower segments allow for the energy to build again.
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Oct 17, 2025Parker’s preternatural sense of how to spool out an elegiacally kiting melody remains wholly intact, even if the music here mostly pares down the soft-serve epics he does so well to remake his sound into what he calls “a kind of a future primitive rave act.”
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Oct 20, 2025It’s a bold sonic reinvention, and the new direction certainly adds some dynamism to Tame Impala’s sound. But Parker’s ambitions are slightly mismatched. .... Far too often on Deadbeat, the songs gesture toward emotional depth without ever fully committing to the messiness required to reach it.
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Oct 29, 2025There’s no denying Deadbeat’s slick production and delightful details, as in the refreshingly raw demo that starts album opener “My Old Ways.” But Deadbeat sounds and feels like an unfinished project, confident, even novel compared to Tame Impala’s earliest EPs, but still somehow incomplete.
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Nov 24, 2025The lyrics don’t always land, and Parker’s refusal to scribble sound into every corner of his tracks is, admittedly, disappointing, considering his past creations. Regardless of these artistic choices and a few genuine blunders, what matters is that Kevin Parker still searches for truth—and occasionally finds it here in his standout songs.
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Oct 17, 2025By its fourth track ‘Loser’, the album’s first single, his insecurities are so hammered down to the listener – “I’m a tragedy / tryna figure my whole life out” – that it begins gets in the way of his arrangements, which so far are imaginative and varied compared to the stylistic tedium of ‘The Slow Rush’.
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UncutNov 10, 2025Too much here feels diaphanous and directionless. [Review of the Year 2025, p.29]
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Oct 21, 2025Those aching for Parker's winning synthesis of classic rock's melancholy and poppy euphoria still have plenty to chew on here. To ravers, Deadbeat might sound like not much more than beach bar music.
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Oct 20, 2025For an artist who’s capable of making genre and generation defining records, Deadbeat just simply isn’t good enough. Too much fluff, too many unfinished ideas, too ponderous, too flabby.
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Oct 17, 2025Aside from spotty traces of Parker’s genius, at no point does the album elicit any passion since there’s really nothing on there that makes you want to own a copy of it on vinyl or witness the tracklist live.
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Oct 21, 2025Most of these songs aren’t offensive on their own. .... The cumulative effect, though, is exhausting, a daisy-chain of shaky half-measures that doesn’t even feel particularly committed to being depressing.
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Oct 21, 2025The song ["Not My world"] goes limp long before it floats through a transition into a Four Tet-cribbing zone of spookiness awash in rubbery synths and gurgling bells. That mid-song shift is emblematic of the restlessness of much of Deadbeat, which is unable to sustain a groove.