Part of being a musician now means giving an audience time to grieve your absence. Tame Impala may have been absent from the studio for five years, but few will have noticed. He remains a popular act off the back of a 2015 classic, though his follow-up to Currents, The Slow Rush, was a disappointment. Half a decade between those two albums, too, so this break between his 2020 mess and this new song, End of Summer, should be no surprise. Tame Impala has not been absent during this time. To do so would be to make himself irrelevant. A Barbie soundtrack feature here, a live show there, it all makes a difference when bringing listeners back in for new material. End of Summer is as easy going and easily accessible as the works before it, though it still cannot grasp the popular high provided by The Less I Know the Better.
It’s the very core of Tame Impala’s work. The song everyone knows without having to recognise the artist behind it. Currents heralded a change in what listeners wanted from pop artists of the time, a refreshing blur of psychedelic and soft pop elements. End of Summer is headed elsewhere. Tech house tones and a repetitive beat which would give even the longest LCD Soundsystem remix a run for its money atop the dull pile. Love songs are nothing new to Tame Impala, and are stale to the tech house beat. Wayne Lineker likely has this song looping around in his head as he wakes up in his version of paradise. Whether the Balearic Islands take to End of Summer is yet to be seen, but it seems like perfect fodder for the party crowd. A wake-up call with a slower beat to ease people into a night of thudding, emotionless noise. It’s the vagueness of Tame Impala which strikes through most of all.
Arms around another, wishes for this care or that experience. It’s a washed-out experience where the inevitabilities of the genre and the typical writing style of those with a very primitive, shallow love hold. Tame Impala has heard Fred Again work miserably choppy instrumentals into headline slots across the globe and, true to the form of any pop artist looking to return to relevancy, has copied what is popular now. It means the work has no long-term impact. End of Summer is a very floaty, repetitive piece of work. At its best, a relatively catchy song is ruined by the lyrical aimlessness. The trouble with a lot of popular music now is the need to spell a feeling out to listeners. No more can the nuance take hold, it has to be direct, as Tame Impala is here.
His desire to have fun and be free falls on ears already receptive to such a lifestyle. But there is fun in depth and thrills to be had in the consideration of subtlety. There is nothing we can take from End of Summer and reflect on further. Fear is what drives a song like this, not of love or life but of not connecting with an audience immediately. We live in passive times where the beat must be bold but acceptable, the lyrics measured and easily interpreted. This is what we get when attention spans are on the decline. End of Summer is a fine enough song, but it does begin to grate, its length certainly weighing the purpose of the song down. There are only so many times you can offer a direct message of love, and this will work far better when Tame Impala starts slapping the light-up soundboard on stage than it does in isolation at home.
