When you make a psychedelic record for loners

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  1. Lonerism is positioned as the hinge of the catalogue, the record that carries Tame Impala from the guitar psych of Innerspeaker to the synth pop of Currents, and nothing after it would exist without it.
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  2. Touring America with MGMT at 24 left Kevin Parker feeling like an outcast, and the parties and social obligations of the road confirmed his own read of himself as an introvert.
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  3. The making conditions inverted the first album. Innerspeaker had a booked studio and a label deadline, this one was made mostly alone in a home studio in Perth with two years before anything was expected.
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  4. Todd Rundgren's A Wizard, a True Star is the model he names, an artist who built his own studio so he could indulge in sound experiments without anyone watching.
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  5. The pivot to synths was physical. He played a vintage synth at a friend's house, found a whole world inside a single key, bought a Sequential Circuits Prophet on eBay, and the album followed from it.
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  6. His stated target for the record is specific and strange: Britney Spears singing with The Flaming Lips, pop chord progressions welded to cosmic sound.
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  7. Feels Like We Only Go Backwards came out of Beach House's Walk in the Park. Same tempo, same key, possibly similar chords, with Parker's brain simply continuing the song after it stopped.
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  8. The drum sound is traceable to one night. He saw The Flaming Lips live in Japan, went back and wanted every drum completely blown out, and Dave Fridman helped him get there on the mix.
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  9. The isolation is built into the production, not only the lyrics. Ambient recordings of people talking at a party are manipulated and delayed so the listener sits alone inside a room of other people's laughter.
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  10. The album was called Loner Pop until after mastering. The word lonerism arrived while CDs were already being pressed, and the earliest pressings still carry the old ID.
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