The Avalanches Return With No Bad Memories and a Harder Sample-Clearing Reality

The Avalanches built Since I Left You out of roughly 3,500 vinyl samples, and for a time that made the method look limitless. Twenty-six years later, Robbie Chater, Tony Di Blasi and Andy Szekeres return with No Bad Memories, a 31-track fourth album that comes with an admission attached: clearing samples has become harder than ever.

The economics have shifted. Chater describes a music business increasingly shaped by corporate investors, where the rights negotiations that let collage function as a practice now form the most punishing stage of finishing a record. Sampling is the band’s art form, as he puts it, and they have accepted that record sales will not carry it.

The source material has changed too. Where the trio once mapped Melbourne’s tram and train lines to work through charity shops, hunting easy listening records by Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman that shaped their floaty, dreamy tone, No Bad Memories was assembled from a different archive: corporate jingles, startup chimes and childhood TV ads pulled from the internet’s deepest recesses. The nostalgia is deliberate, and so is the critique of consumer capitalism running underneath it.

Guests include Jamie xx, Karen O and Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haruomi Hosono. Chater also mentions the vinyl cull of 2020, when he parted with a lifetime collection of around 15,000 records, and says learning Ableton Live may be his next production step. A band that has always treated the sampler as an instrument is still deciding what that instrument should be.