Four albums in twenty-six years is a career built on patience, and ‘No Bad Memories’ spends it on jingles, start-up chimes and half-remembered audio logos: the fabric of an entire era of marketing, repurposed into music. Even the title is a sample, lifted from an old ad slogan for a five-inch floppy disk: exactly the method behind the whole record. Nothing here is found so much as reclaimed. The Australian collective, as detail-obsessed and creative as ever, sample hard drives booting up and forgotten commercials with the same care they once gave soul and disco breaks, refining a way of building songs from other people's leftovers that few others were attempting at the time. The nostalgia here is real, but so is the unease underneath it: is a memory still yours if a corporation designed it to be unforgettable? The Avalanches don't dwell on that doubt for long: there's real passion here for the aesthetic of that era, sonic and visual both, spun into something new, arguably their most ambitious work yet.
The nostalgia here is real, but so is the unease underneath it.
Structurally, this is the most sprawling Avalanches record yet. 31 tracks oscillate between full songs and glitchy, blink-and-miss interludes that feel beamed in from commercials in another universe. Fleshing an album out this far beyond its singles isn't the norm in modern electronic music, and almost everything here is severely experimental: jumbled, addictive momentum masquerading as structure. What holds it together, as ever, is the group's singular and still-growing skill: taking sounds from absolutely anywhere and welding them into something that hits.
The album wastes no time proving it. Opener ‘Bd-R’ sets an eccentric, nostalgia-soaked tone through weird glitching and retro sound effects before ‘Together’, featuring Nikki Nair, Jessy Lanza and Prentiss, arrives as an immediate remix of a Nokia start-up tone: a propulsive, upbeat dance track built from a surprising soundscape of samples that takes you somewhere unexpected and back again. ‘I Give Everything I Have 2 U’, featuring Jungle side project Loaded Honey, pushes their sound further into vintage-electronic territory than Jungle's own material goes, trading their natural sound for the kind of electronic hit The Avalanches do best. By the time ‘Every Single Weekend’, featuring Jamie xx, arrives, all euphoria and floating freedom, the record has already made an explosive case for itself.
The middle stretch is where the guest list starts doing quiet, specific work. ‘Blue Shadows’ finds Karen O sounding moodier and more subdued than she has in years over rich, deep bass. ‘All The Time In The World’, featuring Rivers Cuomo, Vegyn and Baby Marlboro, leans on what founding member Robbie Chater calls Cuomo's gift for "unbelievable hooks," the Brian Wilson influence audible throughout. Elsewhere, ‘Far Away’, featuring John Glacier and Khadija Al Hanafi, buries a rattling garage beat in production that feels both comforting and celebratory, and ‘Vida’, featuring Erick the Architect, is pure bouncy, trumpet party fun. That's a dozen names deep into the credits already, and we're barely halfway through the guest list.
That's a dozen names deep into the credits already, and we're barely halfway through the guest list.
The record's strongest pure single is ‘Can't Get Over Losing You’, featuring Portraits Of Tracy: a simple, engrossing beat and a remarkably catchy topline, arguably the best individual moment on a canvas built from audible fragments of another time and place. ‘Highfield’, featuring Panda Bear, leans so hard into a retro vocal sample it starts to feel like the Beatles or the Beach Boys rebuilt with modern instruments. Elsewhere, Suzanne Ciani's voice turns up sampled from a vintage Sesame Street clip explaining synthesizers on ‘Our Love Is Alive’, a track she shares with Barry Can't Swim, who returns solo on ‘Magic Wand’. He's no minor addition: his own debut was Mercury-shortlisted and BRIT-nominated, and his presence here says plenty about the calibre of talent this project keeps attracting.
‘Total Recall’, featuring Mike Patton, spirals from a slow, dreamy sample into a full sound effect storm, like a sleep interrupted and jolted straight into panic. The ‘Superfun!’ and ‘EL Dorado’ TV-spot interludes, voiced by Haley Joel Osment, send up console-war advertising with a straight face, and it's no novelty cameo: Osment spent weeks filming in Japan for the album's short film, a genuine creative presence rather than just a guest voice. By now the pattern is clear: everyone who touches this record gets folded into the same tapestry, not kept at arm's length as a feature. Another new collaborator? Sure, why not.
By closer ‘The Pavements Light’, featuring Haruomi Hosono, all minimal tones and warm evening light, the chaos settles into something like peace after thirty tracks of distortion and one staggering feat of construction. This record is a world in itself, and only The Avalanches would think to build it. It hits hardest early before settling into a groove it never quite sits still in, and the big names are pulled into the group's own universe, not the other way around. If you need songs to behave like songs, the lack of structure will floor you. If you can learn to chase the chaos instead, there is a genuine thrill in every hairpin turn. Twenty-six years on from a debut that rewired what a pop album could sample and still sound like, The Avalanches are still building things nobody else would have the nerve or capacity to imagine.
