An iPod and a floppy disk sit on the cover of No Bad Memories, so the memories The Avalanches mean are probably the data-storage kind. The title track samples a 1980s OPUS floppy disk ad that promises exactly that: “No Bad Memories”.
There are 31 tracks of pop songs, interludes and commercial jingles real and imagined, a couple narrated by Mike Patton. Old computers boot up, data loads, camera shutters fire and mice click.
Bd-R opens like a foley collage – is that a car door? – before a Smurf-like voice skips through a field of flowers singing “bee-bah-bee”. Together drops you on the dancefloor, sends synths arpeggiating between your headphones like Pop Rocks for the brain and borrows its singing kids from The Famous Five TV series. Elsewhere, ditties scuttle in and out like lost critters on LSD, and at times it sounds like anime characters at a rave.
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Karen O, back from 2020’s We Will Always Love You, gives a career-best turn on Blue Shadows, dropping the Yeah Yeah Yeahs persona to play an enchanting woodland nymph. Rivers Cuomo, who sang on Running Red Lights with Pink Siifu in 2020, returns for All The Time In The World and floats over instrumentation that sets you adrift: “We got all the time in the world… No worries, no…” Every Single Weekend, with Jamie xx, started in the sessions for his 2024 album In Waves and didn’t make that record. It’s found a home here.
Vida, with Erick The Architect, is the drop o’clock summer banger, all brass fanfare, percolating synths and tropical flair.
Our Love Is Alive samples electronic composer Suzanne Ciani from a vintage Sesame Street episode where she shows kids how synthesisers work. Ciani wrote sonic logos for Coca-Cola and Atari and designed sound for pinball machines, and her charming voice appears here with her blessing. She plays Meredith in December.
Far Away, with John Glacier and Khadija Al Hanafi, is the standout. Its hook aches with nostalgia, and the track rebuilds a memory in real time: someone mentions “the sounds of the windchimes”, and there they are.
The band also dig up an overlooked bridge from Carly Simon’s Make Me Feel Something for One More Fantasy, and The Hi-Los singing Skylark for The Pavements Light. No one wrings a sample dry like The Avalanches.
The Avalanches play Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne on 5 March 2027.
No Bad Memories is out now via Modular.
For more information, head here.
