Currents at 10: How Tame Impala’s Masterpiece Perfected the Art of Letting Go

Released on this day in 2015, the electric third album from Australian singer and producer Kevin Parker remains a towering, stirring achievement that set its creator in a thrilling new artistic direction.

By Sam Rosenberg  |  July 17, 2025 | 11:00am
Music Features Tame Impala
Currents at 10: How Tame Impala’s Masterpiece Perfected the Art of Letting Go
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I remember exactly where I was when I first heard Tame Impala’s Currents. I was lying down on a bunk bed, taking a break from my counselor duties at a sleepaway camp in Ojai, California. Completely alone in my cabin, away from the dry July heat and chaos of prepubescent children, I pressed play and listened to the whole thing from start to finish without interruption. Despite the many upbeat tracks that populated the record, listening to it was a weirdly meditative experience for me, as if Kevin Parker, the Australian indie-rock savant behind Tame Impala, was narrating my exact feelings about my breakup with my first serious girlfriend. She also happened to be a counselor at camp with me that summer and started dating a guy only a few weeks after our breakup (and to add poetic insult to injury, they’re now married).

There were a few other albums from 2015 that helped me navigate my romantic blues that summer—Tobias Jesso Jr.’s Goon, Jamie xx’s In Colour, and Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell come to mind—but Currents arrived at an eerily timely moment in my life, functioning as a balm for my disappointment with the end of my first serious relationship, my awkwardness in watching my ex find someone new, and my uncertainty for what was to come as an imminent college freshman. As soon as I heard “The Less I Know The Better” for the first time, I knew almost instantly it would be the classic it rightfully became with its now-iconic opening bassline, but two verses in particular chilled me to the bone: “She was holding hands with Trevor / Not the greatest feeling ever” and “I was doing fine without you / ‘Til I saw your eyes / Turn away from mine.” How was it possible someone could perfectly articulate the anguish of losing a person you once loved and the whiplash of seeing them move on so fast, all while making it sound so groovy?

This, I realized, was part of what made Currents so affecting and enduring ten years after its release: its ability to transform an experience as emotionally torturous as the aftermath of a breakup into something accessible and often joyful. Like all great art, Currents felt like lightning in a bottle, flexing Parker’s creative instincts while deepening the soul of his ideas into a conceptually cohesive whole. The album was a sublime glimpse into what it’s like riding the rocky emotional waves that come with separation from a relationship, realizing that you’re breaking up with parts of yourself in the process, and learning how to let go of the unknown to reach the other side.

Parker had already established his indie street cred with his well-received 2010 debut Innerspeaker and 2012’s also great Lonerism, but Currents took his sharp technical skills and strong ear for catchy, complex instrumentation to the next level. Following a split from his ex-girlfriend Melody Prochet, the album was molded in a period of intense isolation. Parker mixed and recorded everything on his own and took inspiration from the abandoned power plant near his Fremantle home that he’d run laps around.

Despite Parker’s solitude and reputation as an obsessive perfectionist, much of Currents’s magnetic charm lies in how seemingly effortless and open it sounds. The guitar-heavy, psychedelic rock-leaning inclinations from his previous work still found their way onto Currents, but the album’s sonic design trades the looser, shaggier surfaces of Innerspeaker and Lonerism for a cleaner, pop-oriented palette. Part of Parker’s full embrace of a more commercial sound stemmed from working with mega-producer Mark Ronson and a suppressed curiosity about R&B rhythms as a teenager, the latter of which parallels nicely with the album’s overarching theme of letting one’s guard down. In relinquishing his usual musical toolkit in favor of a playful, open-hearted approach, Parker turned his blissfully drugged-out music into something people could dance to, zone out to, and think about.

“Let It Happen,” the album’s captivating opener, embodies a beautiful marriage between these polarities. Across nearly eight minutes, Parker’s falsetto flutters over an intricate tapestry of snappy drum machines and sparkly, sugary synths that eventually free-fall into a glitchy breakdown-turned-funky jam session. It also sets the tone for the rest of the record, in which Parker, his voice more discernible than ever, gently coos about the virtue of submitting to your emotions before dovetailing into vibe-y, vocoded gibberish. Though the babbling in the song’s second half was technically meant just to be a placeholder, it nevertheless fits right in with the song’s spacey, sloping soundscape.

Throughout the rest of Currents, Parker oscillates between rock-star grandeur and stoner-y introspection, and each modality still carries an equally striking impact. The buzzy New Wave shuffle of “The Moment” and riveting angst of “Eventually” balance out the plush melancholy of “Yes I’m Changing” and the self-deprecating balladry of “‘Cause I’m A Man.” As the record’s center of gravity, “The Less I Know The Better” excellently blends the visceral jealousy in Parker’s songwriting with the infectious, disco-laced boogie of his production. Perhaps the background behind the track’s creation speaks to the song’s pure, magical quality: It was birthed spontaneously in just 15 minutes and used only one vocal take.

With each proper song, Parker finds himself either in a state of heightened anxiety (“In the end, it’s coming, there’s nothing left to do / But I’m still not certain, just how I’m gonna feel”) or coolly contemplative (“I felt the strangest emotion but it wasn’t hate for once”), but always straightforward and cautiously optimistic about his circumstances (“And I know that I’ll be happier/ And I know you will, too”). “Past Life” might be the only song that feels more self-conscious and labored than the rest, with Parker lowering his pitch as he describes an anecdote about seeing his former lover until a distortion kicks in to bluntly emphasize the shock of that moment. But even these bumpier instances get defused by Parker’s ingenious touches, with the song culminating with a dizzying phaser and a hauntingly abrupt “hello?” in the outro. To cap the record off, “New Person, Same Old Mistakes” plays as a perfect bookend to the album’s anxious journey toward enlightenment: Parker wrestles with doubt amid his newfound personal transformation over a sinister synth beat that, like “Let It Happen,” breaks suddenly, morphing into what feels like a sonic approximation of being sucked into a black hole, then drifting back to its original instrumental. That sonic switch-up almost feels like a microcosm of the album’s narrative: reality can throw us off our existential axis quickly and unexpectedly, but we eventually find our way back out when we least expect it.

It’s a testament to Currents’s staying power that, in addition to its fresh, vibrant sound, its truths still resonate. The album repeatedly posits that we often have to resist the pull of our past to move forward. Still, it’s that final note of skepticism that perhaps rings the most true: the freedom that follows these transitional phases in our lives can be thrilling and exciting, yet just as easily create even more uncertainty.

That, at least, informed my post-breakup path going into college. Despite having some trepidation about where I’d fit in in a new social environment, I managed to find a community of like-minded pop-culture obsessives and slowly grew comfortable enough to explore my bisexuality. During my sophomore year, I remember “The Less I Know The Better” came on at a party. Initially, I wasn’t sure how to feel, but hearing it in a new context, where I was surrounded by drunk, hot people passionately singing and dancing along to it, the memory of that first relationship suddenly became much less painful. The song just became another song. Maybe it was in that moment that I finally knew what it was like to feel like a brand-new person.

Sam Rosenberg is a filmmaker and freelance entertainment writer from Los Angeles with bylines in The Daily Beast, Consequence, AltPress and Metacritic. You can find him on Twitter @samiamrosenberg.

 
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