Tame Impala - Lonerism

If Innerspeaker introduced the world to Tame Impala, Lonerism was the album that took them out of the indie scene and into the cultural conversation for good. Released in October 2012, Kevin Parker's sophomore record is widely considered his masterpiece — a dizzyingly immersive, deeply personal statement that was named album of the year by Rolling Stone Australia, Triple J, and the J Awards, and went on to earn a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Album.

Recorded mostly in Parker's home studio in Perth and during a stretch in Paris, Lonerism builds on the psychedelic foundation of its predecessor while pushing into bolder, more expansive territory, trading guitars for synthesizers and samples that Parker gathered obsessively on a dictaphone wherever he found himself. The result is an album soaked in themes of loneliness and isolation — a feeling perfectly captured by the cover image of a fenced-off Paris garden, the crowd on one side, Parker quietly watching from the other.

The singles speak for themselves. "Elephant" is a thunderous, bluesy standout unlike anything else in the catalog, while "Feels Like We Only Go Backwards" remains one of the most effortlessly beautiful psychedelic pop songs of the modern era. But it is the album as a whole, experienced start to finish, that reveals its true depth — dizzying and foggy, bright and vibrant, deeply of the 1960s yet unmistakably present.

Spread across two LPs, this is the only way to hear it.