Overview
Innerspeaker is the debut studio album by Australian musical project Tame Impala, released on 21 May 2010 by Modular Recordings. The album was recorded and produced by musician Kevin Parker at a remote beach shack in Western Australia during the winter of 2009, who also wrote every track on it except for interlude "The Bold Arrow of Time".
Innerspeaker was acclaimed by critics for its reminiscence and reinvigorating of 1960s psychedelic rock. The album peaked at number 4 on the ARIA Charts and was certified platinum in the country. At the J Awards of 2010, the album won Australian Album of the Year. It was recognized as the 83rd Best Album of the Decade So Far by Pitchfork in August 2014.
In March 2021, a 4xLP reissue of the album was released to celebrate the album's 10th anniversary.
Background
Tame Impala had previously released their self-titled EP in 2008 and single "Sundown Syndrome" in 2009. In the lead-up to the release of Innerspeaker, four small video snippets were released through their YouTube channel, showing them practicing the songs, "The Bold Arrow of Time", "Island Walking" and another instrumental piece. The album contains two re-recorded songs, "Desire Be Desire Go" (previously released on their self-titled EP) and "The Bold Arrow of Time" (previously recorded, but unreleased).
Past Tame Impala releases were done by Kevin Parker purely for his own enjoyment. Innerspeaker marks the first time Parker has "recorded something for an intended release. In the past [he has] just recorded a song, then done another two weeks later and eventually put them together." While Tame Impala tour as a band, it is Parker's personal music project in which he writes and records all the music to. Commenting on this, Parker said "Tame Impala is just one sliver of the giant amount of noise-making that we do as a circle of friends. I don't feel bad doing the recording by myself because I don't expect that input in their bands...to us Tame Impala is just Kevin Parker's project and everyone has a project" and "Tame Impala has always been a solo project. It has two halves: one half is the recording side which is very calculated and pieced together, and the other side is the live side, where we take what's been recorded and turn them into live songs." Parker has been recording music solo for a long time, as he explains "I’ve always recorded music. When I was 12, I used to set up two tape machines and multi-track myself.
From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).