At long last, Tame Impala is officially back. Today, Kevin Parker shares “End of Summer,” a dreamy, spacey house track that picks up where songs like “Glimmer” left off five years ago. Parker teased the track last month at a surprise DJ set at Nitsa Club Barcelona after a drop-in at Primavera (the Justice collabs seem to have rubbed off).
“End of Summer” feels like if “Be Above It” went acid house. Parker combines thick bass tones and intricate backbeats with his quintessentially reverebed vocals that I am certain are distinct enough to wake me from a coma. The song oscillates between a Berlin basement at 3 AM and the sunrise walk home a few hours later; shimmering chorals are met with crunchy cymbals and heavy bass. And Parker doesn’t forget to get philosophical with it: “Just cause I don’t regret it, doesn’t mean I won’t think about it” hit me square in the chest on the first listen.
Tame Impala as a project has never stayed in one place for long—the gritty psych-rock of Innerspeaker made way for the flanging distortion of Lonerism, before Currents propelled Parker into psychedelic synth super stardom. 2020’s The Slow Rush offered hints of a potential pivot to dance music, with trancey hooks, a pop lean, and the occasional thumping bass. And he hasn’t been quiet in the interim. He had a fluffy, relatively phoned-in feature on the Barbie soundtrack, dropped an underrated single with Thundercat, and was Dua Lipa’s right-hand producer for the Radical Optimism era. But “End of Summer” is the first true solo Tame Impala single in over five years. Now we just have to wait and see how much further into the EDM world he intends to travel.
Alongside the track comes a hazy, meandering music video directed by Julian Klincewicz (with creative direction from Imogene Strauss, of BRAT fame) that finds Parker wandering across countrysides, train tracks, barnyards, and seashores in a perpetual split screen, each side overlaid into oblivion. Watch the video below.
