Songfacts®:

• "My Old Ways" finds Kevin Parker exploring repetitive behavior patterns. He keeps returning to destructive habits despite attempts to break free from them, and he feels powerless in the face of temptation. It's a theme that's been playing in the Tame Impala universe since forever. Remember "Cause I'm A Man," where he sang "I'm a human, human" like a confession and an apology rolled into one? Here, he gives himself the smallest of lifelines:
  
  I tell myself I'm only human
• The track opens Deadbeat, Tame Impala's fifth album. Gone are the glossy dreamscapes of Currents or The Slow Rush. Instead, "My Old Ways" starts with Parker alone at a piano before the song morphs into a percussive, club-like pulse. It signals where Deadbeat is heading: toward the ecstatic chaos of bush doof, a thumping, dust-and-neon brand of rave music native to Western Australia, Parker's own backyard.
• The video, directed by New Zealand's Sam Kristofski (who also helmed the "Loser" clip), looks like it wandered in from another Tame Impala dimension. It cuts between cinéma vérité shots of Parker recording and trudging along Manhattan's 54th Street, and then a surreal mid-song transition takes us through a shimmering "portal" that drops him back home in the Margaret River wilderness.