Lonerism is the second studio album by Australian musical project Tame Impala, released on 5 October 2012 by Modular Recordings. Like the band's debut studio album, Innerspeaker (2010), Lonerism was written, recorded, performed, and produced by Kevin Parker, with live member Jay Watson contributing on two tracks. Recorded mostly in Perth, Australia, and Paris, France, Lonerism builds on the psychedelic sound of its predecessor and features fewer guitars and more synthesisers and samples. Parker attempted to incorporate his love for pop music into his songwriting for the record through catchier melodies. Many tracks feature ambient sounds recorded by Parker with a dictaphone. The album's theme of isolation is reflected in the album cover, featuring an image of a fenced-off Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris.
Lonerism received critical acclaim, and many critics ranked it among the best albums of 2012. It reached number four on the charts in Australia, number 14 in the United Kingdom, and number 34 in the United States. It has sold over 210,000 copies in the United States, and is certified platinum in Australia and silver in the UK. At the 2013 ARIA Awards, Lonerism won Best Rock Album and Album of the Year, while at the 56th Annual Grammy Awards, it was nominated for Best Alternative Music Album. Three singles were released, including "Elephant" and "Feels Like We Only Go Backwards", which charted in several countries. At the J Awards of 2012, the album won Australian Album of the Year.
Background
Tame Impala's debut album Innerspeaker was released to widespread acclaim in 2010, winning a J Award and a Rolling Stone Award for Album of the Year, and 5 nominations at the ARIAs. This led to Tame Impala's global Innerspeaker tour from 2010 to 2011.
Recording
Kevin Parker started writing and recording new material for Lonerism almost immediately after releasing Innerspeaker, saying "I started writing songs straight after Innerspeaker, but I told myself I wouldn't get hung up with the pressure, so I kinda pretended they were for some other weird project that wasn't going to have as much consequence". While Innerspeaker was recorded in a very structured manner with a designated time period to record, Parker recorded Lonerism in many different places around the world whilst touring with Tame Impala. Speaking about this, Parker revealed "I've got a recording thing with me at the moment, I can do vocal takes and guitar takes wherever I am, so it's getting recorded all over the world. There's a guitar take in Vienna, or a vocal take in the aeroplane from Singapore to London. I've got my studio at home, so a lot is being done in Perth."
Speaking about the recording of the record in a 2019 interview with Beats 1's Matt Wilkinson, Parker went into more detail about his home setup in Perth: "It was this amazing time of unhinged experimentation and exploration. I would record until 5am, I'd go to sleep and wake up and start again. I'd just be drinking red wine all night and smoking spliffs. It was this really, really amazing time. This period of discovery. I had found a new guitar sound which led to me finding a new way of writing chords. And these new chords were making me write music that was conjuring up emotions that I hadn't felt in a long time. It reminded me of being a child again, basically."
With the success of Innerspeaker, Parker had "So much more time. With Innerspeaker, we had an engineer come in, we booked a location, we got a house; it was all very official. With this album, it was just me in my home studio. I still had two other housemates, but Tame Impala paid for one of the rooms with the band account and all the money we got from festivals. I started so soon after finishing the last album, so it ended up being two years before the label was expecting to see something. There was time to experiment and completely indulge." With the extra time to record, Parker gave into his desire to make "cheesy pop" songs and said "I've got a whole album waiting for Kylie Minogue. That sounds like a joke, but I actually do. I have seven songs ready."
In late 2010, Parker ran into some problems with the new album: "I had all these demos, half of the new album, on my iPod. And I've got a hole in my bag and it fell out somewhere between Amsterdam and London. So I've been really freaked out recently that the album's just going to turn up on YouTube, half finished, or that it's just going to come out under some other Dutch band name." The demos were later found and returned to Parker. Parker later relocated to Paris in 2011 and "crammed into this little Paris apartment, which looks like a reclusive bunker".