It happened, we can’t believe it, but it finally happened. This past weekend at the 10th installment of Desert Daze Music Festival, Tame Impala got on stage to perform the entirety of Lonerism from start to finish. Describing it as “special” just doesn’t do the performance or occasion justice in the slightest, so please let us attempt to put the experience into words below.

Marking the 10th anniversary of the album’s release, you could sincerely feel the sincerity and graciousness emanating off of Kevin Parker as he took the stage for Desert Daze’s headline spot. The moment this year’s lineup dropped, the psychedelic community on the internet absolutely lost their marbles knowing that this was about to go down. In fact, our entire group of friends flew to the festival primarily to witness. It’s been the center point of conversations for months now, so you can only imagine the immense joy as the greatest live band on Earth walked out. It was about to happen and we were ready.

There’s almost no need to go through the setlist because it’s quite predictable based on them playing it from beginning to end, but the more special moments were seeing it in full. This was our 12th time seeing Tame Impala and we’ve had the pleasure of seeing these songs, or at least most of them, played on either the Currents or The Slow Rush tour, but never back to back to back. The ones that we hadn’t witnessed were easily the main standouts such as “Be Above It” and the live debuts of “Sun’s Coming Up” and “She Just Won’t Believe Me”. We’ve also never had the opportunity to see “Nothing That Has Happened…”, and to be honest, that may just have been the highlight of the set.

Although they were slated for 70 minutes, they played a few minutes over as a handful of songs had extended jams and breakdowns that somehow brought these masterpieces to another level of beauty. Having had the opportunity to speak with drummer Julien Barbagallo prior to the event, he said that the band had to “dust off the cobwebs” in order to get ready for tonight’s show, but now having seen it, they gave a 10/10 effort and truly made so many people’s lives. Music means more to people than just the way it sounds, rather the lyricism and sentimental value that these records hold take precedent. It was as much a moment of glory to see it happen as it was to witness other friend groups love one another and know that they’re seeing history unfold.

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Tame Impala Play "Lonerism" In Its Entirety At Desert Daze 2022