For twenty-six years, The Avalanches have been pop music's most elegant archaeologists. Since Since I Left You washed ashore in 2000 — a debut assembled from thousands of vinyl fragments, held together by little more than joy and tape hiss — Robbie Chater and Tony Di Blasi have treated the sampler not as a tool but as a memory machine. Their records are less albums than haunted houses: you walk through rooms you've never entered and feel strangely homesick.
The announcement of a fourth album, No Bad Memories, arrives with a title that reads like a manifesto. The group's last full-length, We Will Always Love You, was a gorgeous, grief-stricken meditation on absence — built in the shadow of loss and dedicated to the spaces people leave behind. To follow that with something called No Bad Memories is not a retreat into naivety. It's a deliberate act of curation. Chater and Di Blasi have spent their career demonstrating that memory is not a recording but a remix, and here they seem to be asking the most Avalanches question imaginable: what if we simply chose to keep the good parts?
Three Albums in Twenty-Five Years
It's worth remembering how unusual this group's rhythm is. Three studio albums in twenty-five years. A debut so beloved it became a kind of secular scripture for sample-based music. A sixteen-year silence between Since I Left You and Wildflower that would have ended most careers, and instead produced one of the most generous comeback records of the 2010s. The Avalanches don't release albums; they surface. And each time they do, the culture has shifted enough that their collage logic reads differently.
In 2000, crate-digging was a subculture. By 2016, it was a legal minefield. By 2020, it was the native language of the entire internet. Now, with multi-instrumentalist Andy Szekeres fully integrated into the lineup — a shift that has quietly reshaped the group from a studio-bound duo into something closer to a live band — The Avalanches arrive at a moment when the sample has become both ubiquitous and strangely invisible. Everyone chops. Almost nobody builds worlds.
Grain, Wobble, and Borrowed Weather
What has always distinguished this group is texture. Where contemporaries chased crispness, The Avalanches chased grain — the crackle of a needle, the wobble of a pitch-shifted vocal, the specific warmth of a sound that has already lived one life before you hear it. Their productions are famously dense, but never cluttered; the density is emotional, not technical. You don't count the sources. You feel the weather.
No Bad Memories, judging by its title and its placement in the group's arc, seems poised to push this further into the realm of pure mood. The trajectory from Wildflower's sun-bleached psychedelia to We Will Always Love You's cosmic melancholy was a move toward the interior — less beach party, more séance. A record that names itself after the act of selective remembering suggests a third mode: not nostalgia and not grief, but something more active. Forgiveness, maybe. Or defiance.
The hybrid live show the group has developed — part concert, part DJ set — is a clue to how this music is meant to function. These aren't songs you sit and admire. They're environments you enter. The DJ booth and the stage have collapsed into each other, and the album format has become a container for a continuous, evolving experience.
Borrowing as Vocabulary, Not Extraction
There's a cultural argument to be made that The Avalanches have never been more necessary. We are living through the most sample-saturated period in the history of recorded sound — every TikTok, every beat, every advertisement is built from borrowed fragments — and yet so little of it feels like it's *about* anything. The Avalanches use other people's sounds the way novelists use other people's words: not as shortcuts but as vocabulary. Their work insists that borrowing can be an act of love rather than extraction, that a collage can carry a thesis.
No Bad Memories also lands at a moment when the language of memory has become politically charged. What we choose to remember, what we're told to forget, which archives survive and which get bulldozed — these are not abstract questions. A group whose entire practice is built on resurrecting the discarded and the overlooked is, whether it intends to or not, making a statement. The title isn't just a vibe. It's a position.
The Architecture of a Journey
Without a tracklist to parse, the anticipation rests on the group's track record of sequencing — the way Since I Left You opened with a sunrise and closed with a lullaby, the way Wildflower buried its most heartbreaking moment in the middle of its most exuberant stretch. The Avalanches have always understood that albums are journeys, and that the emotional architecture matters as much as any individual song.
What we can expect, based on everything they've built, is a record that rewards patience. These are not artists who front-load singles. They build. They let a motif travel from track three to track nine and only reveal its meaning on the final pass. If No Bad Memories delivers even a fraction of that craft, it will be one of the most rewarding electronic records of the year — not because it's loud or immediate, but because it trusts the listener to stay.
The Avalanches have spent a quarter century proving that the past is not a burden. It's a resource. And with No Bad Memories, they may finally be telling us what they've known all along: that the trick isn't avoiding the bad stuff. It's deciding what to keep.