Another week has gone by and another Why It Mattered video has been released for you to learn more about some of the most influential albums of all time.
This week’s Why It Mattered focuses on Tame Impala’s 2015 album Currents.
The 7-minute video takes you on the journey of one of the most brilliant minds in music and talks about how Currents changed the world around it.
Featuring interviews from Tora’s Jai Piccone, The Vaccines’ Justin Hayward-Young, and guitarist, producer, and vocalist Milan Ring, Why It Mattered speaks from a place of authority about how this album affected these artists and thousands of others like them.
“Its influence on other artists is too profound to measure and in Parker’s home country of Australia, A Tame Impala rip-off band probably forms every weekend.”
After an already successful but relatively localised career, psych-rock extraordinaire Kevin Parker rebuilt Tame Impala from scratch and released Currents in 2015.
Discussing the album from a producer’s perspective, Milan Ring shared that “Finding out that he played all the instruments, produced it and mixed it was like… [brain exploding sound].”
Currents landed Tame Impala on the worldwide stage – it wasn’t only influencing every guy with a guitar down under. It was so huge and so great that even one of the world’s biggest pop/RnB stars Rhianna covered the final track on the album New Person, Same Ol’ Mistakes.
The album was one of the first to properly bridge the gaps between a few very different genres.
Jai Piccone pointed out in doing that, the music brought the fans closer in a whole new way: “It has a great ability to sort of unite I guess electronic music fans, psych-rock fans and pop listeners without losing any of those listeners.”
Millan Ring had a similar experience but with regards to her own creative endeavours: “It really opened my mind up to a lot of things, and a lot of things I experiment with, in terms of blending genres, going outside the bounds of your classic song structure.”
Tame Impala went from being a relatively understated psychedelic-rock band from Perth growing a significant (for Australia) audience to being a world-renowned musical mastermind and it filled other Aussie and international artists with awe.
Justin Hayward-Young reflected on seeing this growth first hand: “[I was] Surrounded by all my friends and what seemed like the entirety of England singing back every word of Currents, that’s an incredibly inspiring thing to see I think.”
Kevin Parker has since gone on to write and produce with some of the biggest names in the industry including Mark Ronson and Lady Gaga. Currents has also gone platinum in Australia and five years after its release, triple j listeners voted The Less I Know The Better as the best song of the decade.
To put it simply, Tame Impala’s Currents mattered.
Watch the full video below:
