Currents (Tame Impala album)
Currents is the third studio album by Australian musical project Tame Impala, released on 17 July 2015 by Modular Recordings. It was released by Interscope Records in the United States and by Fiction Records in the United Kingdom, while Caroline International released it in other regions. Like the project's previous two albums, Currents was written, recorded, performed, and produced by Kevin Parker. For the first time, Parker mixed the music and recorded all instruments by himself; the album featured no other collaborators.
Currents
After the release of his previous album, Lonerism (2012), Parker began work on Currents, largely recording at his home studio in Fremantle. He engrossed himself with writing and recording, and in keeping with his reputation as a musical auteur, laboured over the details of each song, ultimately causing the release date to be delayed by two months. In contrast to the psychedelic rock sound of the project's prior work, Currents marks a shift to more dance-oriented music, with more emphasis placed on synthesisers than guitars. Parker was inspired to seek a change out of desire to hear Tame Impala's music played in dance clubs and a more communal setting. Thematically, the record is about the process of personal transformation, which many critics interpreted to be the result of a romantic breakup. The album's cover art depicting vortex shedding is a visualisation of these themes.
Currents was supported by the release of the singles "Let It Happen", "'Cause I'm a Man", "Eventually" and "The Less I Know the Better". The album became the project's best charting release, debuting at number one in Australia, number three in the United Kingdom, and at number four in the United States. As of January 2023, Currents has sold over one million copies in the United States. Like its predecessors, the album received critical acclaim and appeared on various critics' lists of the best albums of 2015. At the 2015 ARIA Music Awards, Currents was awarded Best Rock Album and Album of the Year, and it also received nominations for the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album and the J Award for Australian Album of the Year.[5] In December 2021, the album was listed at number 12 in Rolling Stone Australia's list of the "200 Greatest Australian Albums of All Time",[6] and in 2020, Rolling Stone ranked Currents 382nd on its list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time".
Composition[edit]
Music[edit]
Currents features styles of psychedelic pop,[27] disco,[28] R&B,[29] and electropop,[30] but the album's chord progressions and rhythms are most indebted to R&B.[31] Kevin Parker listened to R&B from the 1990s during recording,[18] which he had forced himself to reject while growing up due to peer pressures. He said, "Music guys aren't allowed to be into R&B when they are teenagers because all the teenybopper kids blast that shit in their cars." As such, learning to let go of preconceptions and embracing the music felt liberating to him.[32] He had previously refrained from making his music more pop-oriented because he thought "indie-music snobs would turn their nose up at it,"[33] and he discovered that writing pure pop music was a challenge.[34] Parker attributed his openness on Currents to producer Mark Ronson, whose album Uptown Special he collaborated on.[22][32]
Many of the songs were composed over several years, both in the studio and on the road. Parker saved ideas using a voice recorder on his phone,[33] and wrote many songs on a drum machine.[35] Guitars are present in every song on Currents, but are used to accompany and answer other instruments.[31] This was partially due to his gear being inaccessible: "We'd finish one tour in say, Europe, go home for two weeks, and all our gear, including my guitars and pedals, would be on their way to South America." He had a larger array of synthesizers at his home studio, which allowed them to become the prominent instrument. He said, "It's really just whatever is sitting around when I think of the song."[31] The album incorporates Parker's falsetto, as well as a vocoder.[18]
Release[edit]
The album's promotional cycle began when lead single "Let It Happen" was released as a free download on 10 March 2015. One day later, Parker was in New York for a mastering session with engineer Greg Calbi.[11] The album was originally set to be released in May 2015, capitalizing on the group's appearance at Coachella.[32] But as the album neared mastering, Parker was not yet done with lyrics for two songs. His perfectionism led to the album's release date being pushed back to July.[22] In the interim, three more singles were released: "'Cause I'm a Man" and "Disciples" in April during a Reddit AMA, and "Eventually" in May.[1][43] Due to the album's delay, Chris DeVille at Stereogum noted that "about a third of the record [had] gone public already" by the time it was released.[32]
In October 2017, a "collector's edition" of Currents was announced. The release includes three B-sides and two remixes, and was released on 17 November.
The cover art for Currents and its accompanying singles was created by Kentucky-based artist and musician Robert Beatty.[44] Kevin Parker has said Currents' designs are based on a diagram of vortex shedding he remembered while trying to visualise the album's themes.[45] Beatty described how Parker's ideas for the album artwork "were all based on turbulent flow, the way liquid or air flows around objects."[44]
Commercial performance[edit]
Currents debuted at number one in Australia,[71] the group's first album to top the charts in their native country.[72] It debuted at number three in the United Kingdom, becoming Tame Impala's first top-ten album in the country.[73] In the United States, the album debuted at number four on the Billboard 200, moving 50,000 "equivalent album units" in its first week, 45,000 of which were sales;[74] it was the group's first top-ten entry on the chart.[75] The record debuted well on other Billboard charts, entering the Alternative Albums chart and Vinyl Albums chart at number one, and the Top Rock Albums chart at number two; first-week sales of vinyl copies in the US totaled 14,000, the highest for any album in a single week in the US since Jack White's Lazaretto more than a year prior.[75] As of December 2015, 120,000 copies of Currents have sold in North America.[76] In September 2015, the UK's Official Charts Company announced the creation of a new monthly chart called the Official Progressive Albums Chart, and that Currents would be its first number-one album.[77]
Tame Impala
Technical
Artwork