More than once during Monday night’s packed Tame Impala show at Denver’s Mission Ballroom, frontman Kevin Parker asked for the lights to come up so he could get a look at the audience.

“Hey, I’m just gonna speak honestly right now… right now, I’m feeling like Red Rocks is great and everything, but I feel like I’m having twice as much fun,” Parker said between songs during the band’s first show at Mission Ballroom, which opened in August. “I’m definitely having twice as much fun. This is a new place, yeah? (Expletive) yeah. I dunno, something great about us all being all caked in together and sweaty.”

He was not wrong about the crowd being “caked in together and sweaty.” Australian psych-rock outfit Tame Impala easily could have filled Red Rocks Amphitheatre — a venue with more than twice the capacity of Mission Ballroom — as it did during its last sold-out Denver appearance in 2016. The band’s two Mission Ballroom shows — Monday and Tuesday night — are what promoters call an “underplay,” when a hugely popular act is booked for a venue much smaller than the band’s draw. Bands sometimes request smaller venues to create an intimate show for fans, but underplays are also used to bring attention to a new venue like Mission Ballroom. (Check out a slideshow from Monday night’s concert.)

The smaller capacity made ticket-buying a headache for some fans after the show initially sold out in seconds, with tickets immediately popping up on the secondary market for more than double the price. According to ticketing company AXS, “thousands” of fans were unable to buy tickets when they initially went on sale, despite AXS ”blocking thousands of bot requests,” and others paid more than double the face value in order to buy them through AXS’s in-house resale option — or took their chances on the secondary market. In response to fans frustrated by the online ticket-buying process, Mission Ballroom canceled hundreds of ticket purchases it deemed “fraudulent” and later announced that the venue would open its box office from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. every Saturday and one hour prior to the listed door time for shows.

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But for fans who got into Monday night’s show, the reward was 90 minutes of ear-splitting psychedelic rock set to trippy visuals and the occasional laser light spectacle. It was a wild ride — one that refreshingly began at 9:15 p.m. on the dot, which is oh-so-welcome for a Monday night show. (I would absolutely suggest arriving at 8 p.m. Tuesday night to catch opener Altin Gun, a Turkish psych-rock band from Amsterdam that feels like a synth-fueled fever dream ricocheting from the high desert to the deepest, trippiest reaches of outer space.)

At its core, Tame Impala is a one-man act led by Australian musician Kevin Parker, who writes, produces and records the band’s music and acts as lead singer and guitarist. On the road, he’s joined by several other musicians, including some members of fellow Aussie psych-rock band Pond.

In the U.S. and beyond, Tame Impala is having a serious moment right now: the band headlined the Coachella music festival in April and played two shows at New York’s Madison Square Garden in August. Parker had planned to release a new Tame Impala album — the band’s first since its 2015 album “Currents” — before this summer’s tour, but it didn’t come together in time. While working on the album at a Malibu Airbnb in November 2018, the California wildfires forced Parker to evacuate, and the Airbnb — along with $30,000 worth of Parker’s instruments and recording gear — was destroyed, according to the New York Times.

But fans didn’t need to use a new record as an excuse to catch the band as it played Denver between headlining slots at both weekends of the Austin City Limits Music Festival in Texas, which wraps up on Sunday.

As any Tame Impala fan can attest, the band’s music feels exceptionally experiential, with trippy, undulating soundscapes that ebb from one ear through your brain and out the other, washing over you. At least that’s how it feels when the volume’s way up. And it was definitely way up at Mission Ballroom on Monday night.

Opening strong with “Let it Happen,” the popular opening track on “Currents,” Tame Impala crescendoed throughout the course of the night, playing the band’s dancy new single “Borderline” next and, eventually, building up to a laser-light show that exploded partway through the crunchy guitar riffs of “Elephant,” eliciting the collective roar of the audience.

In 2013, I caught a Tame Impala show at the rickety, now-razed venue Fitzgerald’s in Houston, where I first experienced Parker’s acumen for creating rich, deep soundscapes that rattle your chest and leave your ears ringing. Back then, before the band became the festival headliner it is today, the band’s sound was even crunchier, messier and prone to droning jams that oozed from one song into the next.

The 2019 Tame Impala is tighter and a bit cleaner, with far more production value. Tame Impala has always relied on psychedelic visuals to lead audiences down a sonic rabbit hole; now, with more buzz (and money) behind the band, those visuals are trippier and more all-encompassing than ever.

At times, especially from my perch near the top of the tiered seating at the back of the room (what I call the I’m-in-my-mid-30s-and-have-to-work-in-the-morning seats), it felt like I could almost reach out and touch the lasers shooting above my head. This was the kind of show that, after a raucous encore of “The Less I Know the Better” and “New Person, Same Old Mistakes,” spit you out into the chilly fall night, ears ringing, blurry spots speckling your vision from the epic lights.

If you’ve scored one of the hot tickets for Tuesday night’s final Denver show, buckle in: You’re in for a wild ride, and you’re liable to love every second of it.

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