The Avalanches announce their 31-track fourth album ‘No Bad Memories,’ out Oct. 16, sharing single ‘Can’t Get Over Losing You’
The Avalanches have never done anything quickly, and No Bad Memories has been worth the buildup. On Aug. 6, the Melbourne sample-pop auteurs announced their fourth studio album, due October 16 via Modular Recordings, and shared “Can’t Get Over Losing You,” a new single featuring Baton Rouge producer and singer Portraits of Tracy. Six years on from 2020’s We Will Always Love You, it is the return of one of electronic music’s most meticulous crate-digging outfits, and at a reported 31 tracks, it may also be their most ambitious canvas yet.
The concept is pure Avalanches, equal parts wonder and unease. No Bad Memories is built around the simultaneously magical and insidious ways that advertising and name-brand technology wrap themselves around our memories. The band describes it as an ambivalent ode to the nostalgic pull of commercial jingles, proprietary start-up sounds, and long-forgotten audio logos, flipping the detritus of corporate culture into something joyful. It is a record about how a jingle from your childhood can lodge deeper than a real memory, and what it means to reclaim those fragments as art.
A Concept Built on Corporate Nostalgia
That thesis reflects a very specific generational reckoning. “It’s been interesting as adults to reflect on this often stunning period of marketing, the creativity, filmmaking, photography and music, but which was also, you know, selling a completely unobtainable dream,” the group, Robbie Chater, Tony Di Blasi, and Andy Szekeres, explained. They spoke of “the wonder of memory and deep power of nostalgia, especially in sound,” and of revisiting childhood imagery and jingles and realizing how profoundly they had stuck. “Taking these sound sources from within the heart of this kinda corporate framework and flipping the fragments into our own kind of joyous pop music, eventually we arrived at this world of No Bad Memories.”
Fittingly, the rollout itself has been a piece of media art. Four months ago the band began teasing the LP with an elaborate ARG centered on a fictional company, Takumi Digital Archives, layering in immersive multimedia that mirrored the album’s obsession with advertising and nostalgia. The new single arrives with an animated video by longtime visual collaborator Jonathan Zawada, who also designed the cover art, extending the record’s world beyond the audio.
A Guest List Only The Avalanches Could Assemble
As ever, the album doubles as a summit of kindred spirits. “Can’t Get Over Losing You” follows three prior singles that have quietly mapped the record’s scope: “Together” with Nikki Nair, Jessy Lanza, and Prentiss, “Every Single Weekend” with Jamie xx, and “Blue Shadows” featuring Karen O. The through-line is collaboration, a hallmark stretching back through We Will Always Love You, Wildflower, and their landmark debut. Of Portraits of Tracy, the band was effusive, calling her “a hilarious, brave and tender human being” and “truly a generational talent” whose voice and songwriting “break our heart time after time.”
The stakes are considerable because of what The Avalanches represent. Their 2000 debut Since I Left You laid a global footprint for collaborative sampology in the 21st century, moving over 1 million copies and generating some 700 million streams while influencing a generation of producers. They have kept a hand in the wider scene too, appearing on Jamie xx’s acclaimed 2024 album In Waves with “All You Children.” A new Avalanches record is not just an album drop. It is an event for anyone who cares about sample culture.
Whether No Bad Memories can sustain its themes across 31 tracks is the question the full release will answer. But on the evidence of its singles and its dizzyingly conceptual rollout, The Avalanches sound fully re-engaged, still chasing the specific alchemy of turning discarded sound into something that feels like memory itself. October 16 cannot come soon enough.
