The Avalanches and Karen O reunite on ‘Blue Shadows,’ a rescued demo built on a 1984 Italo sample, ahead of their unannounced fourth album
The Avalanches have built a twenty-five-year career on the principle that nothing is ever really lost, only misfiled. “Blue Shadows,” the Australian group’s new single featuring Karen O, is that principle applied to their own archive. The track began as an idea from Andy Szekeres that sat forgotten for years until Tony Di Blasi found it in an old folder and started arguing for it as an album song. It arrived Thursday (July 23) as the third single of a 2026 campaign for a fourth album the band still has not formally announced.
The song is built on a sample of “Shadows From Nowhere,” a 1984 Italo disco cut by Blue Gas, and clearing it required its own small act of generosity. Robbie Chater credited Claudio Casalini and the estate of Celso Valli for making Di Blasi’s dream feasible. What resulted is among the most restrained things the group has released: a sunny, almost reggae-adjacent lope, shimmering synths, and a muffled vocal sample sitting just behind Karen O’s lead. It is a reminder that chillwave, as a genre, could not have existed without these records.
A Vocal Nobody Expected
The collaboration nearly did not happen at all. “I included it in a selection of song ideas for Karen, we wanted her to hear it although I never imagined a vocal would be possible,” Chater said. “The demo had such a peculiar, singular mood.” What came back still stuns him. He described her performance as “so achingly forlorn and somehow sounds as if it always existed as a song.”
Karen O did not hesitate. “When Robbie sent me ‘Blue Shadows’ I jumped at the chance to collaborate,” she said. “The Avalanches’ last record We Will Always Love You was a gift to humanity in 2020 and I’ll count it as one of my Top 10 forever. The Avalanches frequency is high, I’m so happy to be asked to slide into it.” Her delivery is luxurious and held back, yearning through the chorus toward the question the song keeps circling: does anybody know how to mend a broken heart?
This is her second appearance in their catalogue. On We Will Always Love You she sang “Dial D for Devotion,” an interlude that ranks among the most melancholic moments on an album full of them, delivering lyrics from Purple Mountains’ “Darkness and Cold.” David Berman, who wrote them, had himself featured on “Saturday Night Inside Out” from 2016’s Wildflower. The Avalanches keep their collaborators, and their ghosts, close.
An Album Assembling Itself in Public
The rollout has been unusual. “Blue Shadows” follows “Together,” with Nikki Nair, Jessy Lanza, and Prentiss, and “Every Single Weekend” with Jamie xx, each dropped without fanfare and each pointing in a different direction. The band has suggested the album itself may still be a few years out, which by their standards is not even slow. Sixteen years separated Since I Left You from Wildflower.
That patience is the whole method. The Avalanches make records from fragments that took decades to find each other, and a song like “Blue Shadows,” rescued from a forgotten folder and completed with a vocal nobody planned for, is the process made audible rather than a stopgap between announcements.
They play a single New York show on October 22, their first US date in four years, and return to London in November for headline shows as part of Pitchfork Music Festival London, with DJ appearances across Europe this summer. Whatever the fourth album turns out to be, it is arriving one rescued idea at a time.
