One More Hour with Tame Impala
I spent Friday night at the Barclays Center, watching from section 19 as Kevin Parker and his band took the 360-degree stage to perform to a sold-out crowd.
I love concerts, but I don’t love stadium shows. They’re big, booming, and energetic, but so often feel impersonal. I suppose that’s the reality of being in a room with fifteen thousand plus people. It’s counterintuitive, but I find the thrill of live music — the buzzing energy and collective presence — actually gets muted when it scales so large. It’s also impossible for the experience at an arena not to feel at least a little commercial and over-polished.
But if you want to catch a major artist on tour, the tradeoff is the stadium. And so we went.
There are, like most things in life, exceptions to the rule — in this case, stadium shows that truly rock. I had the time of my life at the last-minute Fred again.. / Four Tet / Skrillex party at MSG. Oasis playing to 60,000 mad lads at the Scottish National Rugby Stadium was another highlight.
Tame Impala’s Deadbeat tour is one of those exceptions. A show that not only works in a stadium, but works best in a stadium.
It had been 10 years since I had seen a Tame Impala show. My first experience was a lucky encounter. At Lollapalooza 2015, I got dragged away from Perry’s Stage so my friend could catch an Aussie psych rock band he’d been hearing about. We shuffled through the crowd and found our footing at Lolla’s mainstage just as Tame Impala launched into the opening swell of their first track.
The wobbly synth that sounds like a portal opening led into the first chords of “Let It Happen,” and sent the crowd into a hypnotic trance. I was blown away. It was so sonically different than anything I had ever heard before. Currents had only come out two weeks before, but everyone knew every word. It felt like I was witnessing something rare and eclectic.
A lot has changed in the decade since. Kevin Parker has ascended to global stardom as the mastermind behind the Tame Impala project. There are two more albums in the repertoire: The Slow Rush, and the recently released Deadbeat. There’s a whole new generation of fans, many of whom found the timeless, escapist sounds like “The Less I Know The Better” through slap-bass covers on TikTok. Tame Impala has also become known for their immersive, visually stunning live shows — the kind that took the upstart band from down unda from undercard slots, to headlining nearly every festival they play.
Deadbeat, despite an impressive start on the charts, hasn’t had the warmest critical reception. It’s a foray further into the electronic music stratosphere for Tame — fewer psych flourishes and live instrumentation, many more four-on-the-floor beats. As a dance music fan, I understand and appreciate the vision. Yet, something about the Tame Impala album feels half-baked. There are some legitimate bops — but the album as a whole didn’t do it for me, especially when compared to the previous bodies of work.
Throughout the week leading up to the show, I caught glimpses of the brand-new tour through the lens of Instagram — a few friends were there on opening night. I was quick to judge their 15–30 second footage, not finding myself overly impressed by the new production, and feeling like Kevin’s vocals sounded a bit flat. A lackluster preview paired with an album I found to be just okay wasn’t exactly a recipe that juiced me up for the upcoming performance.
And now, on the other side of the Deadbeat show on Halloween night in Brooklyn, I feel a little silly. Very silly, actually.
The show, for lack of a better term, slapped.
The psych rock jams from InnerSpeaker and Lonerism, like the pulsating “Elephant,” got the arena rocking. The climactic moments of the show were centered around the Currents era. “Let It Happen,” the same song that, a decade ago, brought me into the Tame Impala universe, was the peak of peaks in 2025: tension, confetti, and a euphoric roar. And I couldn’t help myself — I was singing along to all the new Deadbeat songs. ALL of them. There were certainly some creative risks: a three-and-a-half-minute piss-break live-casted on the jumbotron, followed by a 20-minute instrumental EDM-segment. But all in all, it was everything I could have asked for, and quite a bit more.
I felt silly because I realized I was being a hater by default, and hating from the sidelines, at that. I almost talked myself out of having a great time because someone else’s Instagram story looked lame. These are the perils of the internet — stimulus, opinions, and points of view arrive preloaded, before experiences have a chance to be personal.
No videos, no matter how perfect the angle or timing, can capture the feeling of a live concert experience — of being there. They can’t make you feel what it feels like to live your life. To go out into the world and do shit! I know that sounds obvious, but sometimes it’s helpful to be reminded.
There was so much detail in the show’s production. Nuance and subtlety that would never have been captured through a screen. An obscene amount of smoke pumped into the building formed a heavy haze that warped your senses. The lights, lasers, and strobes were dialed in, synchronized perfectly to change in frequency. The translucent video screen and lighting rig lifted, lowered, tilted, and leaned. The cinematography and visual effects layered on top were hypnotic.
I’m not going to say that the show changed my opinion on Deadbeat as an album. But it changed the context in which I hear it. Artistry almost always makes more sense once you have the full picture. I gained an appreciation for how the new tracks fit into the broader discography. But as danceable as they were — as much as they had the crowd swaying — they still paled in comparison to the tried and true hits. Truthfully, it felt like night and day, energetically. This is to be expected with an album so new. But it’s hard to see these new tracks staying as timeless and fresh-feeling as the uplifting, ethereal “Eventually.”
The Tame show was my most recent reminder that deciding how you feel before you actually feel something is a pretty dull way to live. Better to do the thing — go to the show, try the restaurant, take the trip — and then decide what you think. Do, then decide. Not the other way around.
Whenever I find myself getting nostalgic, it’s usually for a time of not knowing — for moments where I walked into something without a plan or prejudice. I rarely find myself thinking back to the instances where I had everything “figured out.” The art of the blind stumble-in feels like it’s dwindling, maybe even going extinct. And I’m keen on bringing it back. Because I’m realizing that’s when I really feel the most alive.
I don’t know exactly how to do that consistently. But I think part of it is leaving room for spontaneity — letting your curiosities pull you off the obvious path. It does feel like an uphill battle in the age of the internet, where opinions tend to drift toward the mean. But I do know this: everything is better experienced than previewed.
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