Tame Impala’s second album Lonerism was released 10 years ago today. We had a whole lot to say about it in our Anniversary piece, and it seems that Kevin Parker has been in a reflective mood as well. This past weekend, he played the album front-to-back in a special Desert Daze set, and now he’s taken to his Instagram account to share some thoughts on it.

“Difficult to sum up what the album means to me at this point,” he wrote, continuing:

It was a pretty special time for me making the music (it wasn’t an album yet at that point). In a way it’s when I truly discovered myself as an artist. Coming off the back of Innerspeaker I had this new sense of purpose…calling… whatever you want to call it. I had finally given myself permission to let music take over my being completely… to become totally immersed in my own world of recording music. So I had this new sense of creative freedom. I felt free to be ambitious, weird, pop, experimental, whatever, and didn’t feel judged because I was finally just doing it for myself and believed in myself. For the most part anyway… of course the day came to release it and it all came crashing down and I thought the album sucked and couldn’t even imagine people enjoying it. As it turns out I was wrong… the album dropped and exceeded all my expectations and my life changed massively again, and I slowly realised the music was pretty good, again, which gave me a new sense of purpose, and the cycle starts again….

He also shared the original photo that would eventually become the cover art. See below.

UPDATE: There’s more… Loner Pop!