The Avalanches, photo de presse (credit Dean Podmore)
Six years after “We Will Always Love You,” The Avalanches are back with “No Bad Memories,” a fourth album released October 16 on Modular Recordings. The Australian duo push their trademark sample collage further than ever, turning advertising jingles and the sounds of childhood into thirty-one tracks of dizzying, joyous pop.
The concept comes straight from the band: an era of advertising that was both dazzling and selling “a completely unobtainable dream.” The Avalanches mined their own memories of jingles and commercials to build what they call “our own kind of joyous pop music.” The result is maximalist by design: thirty-one tracks, flowing as one uninterrupted stream of repurposed samples.
Since forming in Melbourne in the late 1990s, Robbie Chater and Tony Di Blasi have built The Avalanches’ entire identity on this collage logic. Their debut, “Since I Left You” (2000), built from more than 3,500 samples, made them pioneers of the plunderphonics genre. A second album didn’t arrive for sixteen years — “Wildflower” (2016) — followed four years later by “We Will Always Love You” (2020), which already gathered guests as varied as Leon Bridges, Rivers Cuomo and Johnny Marr. “No Bad Memories” follows the same philosophy, but mines different raw material: rather than the soul and disco of their early work, it’s the sonic codes of advertising and digital interfaces from the 1990s and 2000s that fuel the album.
A heavyweight cast of guests
As on every Avalanches record, the cast is eclectic. “No Bad Memories” brings in Karen O, Jamie xx, Jessy Lanza, Nikki Nair and Prentiss. The latest single, “Can’t Get Over Losing You,” spotlights Portraits of Tracy, a self-taught producer and multi-instrumentalist from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It follows three earlier singles: “Together,” “Every Single Weekend” (with Jamie xx) and “Blue Shadows” (with Karen O).
The cover art, by Jonathan Zawada — who also directed the visualiser for “Can’t Get Over Losing You” — captures the record’s spirit: cartoon iPod and floppy-disk characters set against a pristine white background, caught somewhere between tech nostalgia and pop irony.
A critical reception split between fascination and vertigo
Early reviews are mixed, but never indifferent. Critics broadly praise the band’s ability to still surprise more than two decades in, while questioning how digestible such a dense format really is. The reviews published so far circle around the same tension: is the record a dazzling act of musical archaeology, or simply too much to take in at once?
- The record is described as mad, joyful and utterly absorbing — proof the band can still surprise more than two decades after their debut.
- Others hear a hyperactive collage of hundreds of samples, a mirror of today’s digital overload refracted through yesterday’s commercial dreams.
- The more mixed takes point to a manic record that keeps shifting tone, to the point where its brightest moments sometimes read closer to ad-copy than critique.
- A 31-track runtime that some find as exhausting as it is fascinating, depending on the listen.
That critical split is hardly a surprise for a band whose founding principle has always been accumulation over restraint. Since “Since I Left You” in 2000, The Avalanches have consistently favoured collage saturation over minimalism. “No Bad Memories” is no exception, nearly doubling the track count of their previous records.
With this comeback, The Avalanches confirm they remain one of the most singular projects in contemporary electronic pop, still able to make a dancefloor move on the recycled ruins of 1990s and 2000s advertising culture. More than two decades after inventing their own corner of sample-based pop, the duo prove that the plunderphonics blueprint they drew up with “Since I Left You” still has room to surprise, even as their records arrive further and further apart.
