Tame Impala has admitted to singing “gibberish” during his Saturday Night Live performance in 2019.
The Australian multi-instrumentalist, also known as Kevin Parker, appeared on the show as a musical guest that year, and debuted his comeback single ‘Patience‘ and a previously unreleased song called ‘Borderline’.
A year after the SNL gig, ‘The Slow Rush’ was shared, featuring a new version of the latter track, with Parker explaining that he put an alternate version on the record because he had overthought the track so much.
“I was so in my own head about the song,” he said at the time. “The way I describe it is the way it sounds now is the way I was hearing it when I released it the first time. So for me, the drums sounded just heaps more hard-hitting.”
In a recent interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1, he looked back on the track’s debut and admitted he “didn’t have lyrics ready for the song”.
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“I was up until six o’clock in the morning trying to record the song and I just didn’t finish it, so to this day, Borderline’s lyrics are mumbled on SNL. I’m just saying gibberish.”
He asked Lowe: “You know how artists do in the studio before they have lyrics? They just sing whatever? I did that on SNL. If that shows just how much of fucking a mental state I was in that moment, I just didn’t care.
“I was so preoccupied with the song and the album and everything else, I think Coachella was coming up then. It didn’t seem absurd to me that I was gonna do that. I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll just sing whatever.’ I tell people that story and they just don’t believe me, I have to show them the YouTube video.”
Parker went on: “We had to submit the lyrics to SNL, for censoring. Our tour manager, she was like, ‘Oh yeah, I had to submit the lyrics and I had nothing’. She wrote something out – I don’t remember what it was.
“It was good. I sang words. I’ve done that before with songs, like the ‘Let It Happen’ vocoder bit is just gibberish. It’s me just singing in tongues, really.”
Fans have since flooded the comments of the years old video following his admission to Lowe. “Here after the interview and I can hear it now,” wrote one user, with another simply adding: “Yo he really was mumbling.”
Tame Impala are set to kick off a huge US, UK and European tour starting later this month, with the UK and Europe leg set to commence in April 2026, where he’ll land in London to start his run of UK dates at the O2 Arena on May 7. He’ll later visit Manchester (8), Birmingham (9) and Glasgow (11) before finishing off with a final show at Dublin’s 3Arena (13).
Visit here for US and European tickets, here for UK tickets and see all dates below:
Tame Impala’s 2025/2026 and ‘Deadbeat’ tour dates are:
OCTOBER 2025
27 – Barclays Center, Brooklyn, New York [NEW]
28 – Barclays Center, Brooklyn, New York [NEW]
31 – Barclays Center, Brooklyn, New York
NOVEMBER 2025
01 – Barclays Center, Brooklyn, New York
03 – United Center, Chicago, IL
06 – Moody Center, Austin, TX
09 – Pechanga Arena, San Diego, CA
11 – Kia Forum, Los Angeles, CA
12 – Kia Forum, Los Angeles, CA
14 – Oakland Arena, Oakland, CA
15 – Oakland Arena, Oakland, CA
17 – Kia Forum, Los Angeles, CA
APRIL 2026
04 – Super Bock Arena – Pavilhão Rosa Mota – Porto, Portugal
05 – MEO Arena – Lisbon, Portugal
07 – Movistar Arena – Madrid, Spain
08 – Palau Sant Jordi – Barcelona, Spain
10 – LDLC Arena – Lyon, France
12 – Inalpi Arena – Turin, Italy
13 – Unipol Arena – Bologna, Italy
14 – Hallenstadion – Zurich, Switzerland
16 – Olympiahalle – Munich, Germany
18 – PreZero Arena – Gliwice, Poland
20 – O2 Arena – Prague, Czechia
23 – Barclays Arena – Hamburg, Germany
25 – Royal Arena – Copenhagen, Denmark
26 – Avicii Arena – Stockholm, Sweden
27 – Unity Arena – Oslo, Norway
29 – Uber Arena – Berlin, Germany
30 – Festhalle – Frankfurt, Germany
MAY 2026
01 – PSD Bank Dome – Dusseldorf, Germany
03 – Accor Arena – Paris, France
04 – Ziggo Dome – Amsterdam, Netherlands
05 – AFAS Dome – Antwerp, Belgium
07 – The O2 – London, United Kingdom
Elsewhere, watch Tame Impala preview his trippy new techno song ‘Not My World’ at his Mexico City DJ set.
Tame Impala dropped his fifth studio album ‘Deadbeat’ today (October 17), with NME giving it three stars and noting that “Parker has grown outside his comfort zone, only to strike a kind of lyrical inertia that becomes detrimental to his new vocabulary of music”.
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