Australian electronic duo the Avalanches have released their fourth studio album, *No Bad Memories*, accompanied by a 35-minute short film starring actor Haley Joel Osment. The project, unveiled on 16 October, reflects the band’s continued innovation in plunderphonics—a genre noted for its extensive use of sampling—and marks their most ambitious work to date.
Robbie Chater and Tony Di Blasi, the Avalanches’ founding members, recorded the album and shot the film last December in the mountainous, snowy region of Minakami, Japan. The film depicts Osment as Ken, an employee of the fictional digital archives company Takumi, which collects and stores physical memorabilia such as VHS tapes, CDs, and photo albums. The narrative explores themes of memory and perception, blurring the lines between personal recollections and commercial imagery. Ken’s increasingly disorienting experience culminates in a surreal refuge inside a giant iPod, symbolizing the album’s preoccupation with how technology and advertising shape personal memory.
Chater and Di Blasi’s work has long been characterized by its dense layering of samples, drawing from a wide array of sources including vintage pop, soul, and everyday electronic sounds. *No Bad Memories* expands this palette significantly, incorporating motifs such as video game bleeps, hard drive noises, and audio logos from outdated devices. The album’s sound has been compared to the chaotic joy of flipping through a lineup of 1980s Saturday morning cartoons, offering a frenetic, energetic listening experience that breaks conventional song structures.
The Avalanches’ storied career began in the late 1990s in Melbourne, with their 2000 debut *Since I Left You* earning critical acclaim for its innovative use of more than 3,500 samples drawn from an eclectic range of recordings. After a 16-year gap punctuated by personal and professional challenges—including lineup changes, health issues for Chater, and legal obstacles surrounding sample clearances—the group released *Wildflower* in 2016 and *We Will Always Love You* in 2020, each building on their signature sound with diverse guest artists.
*No Bad Memories* features contributions from a varied lineup, blending established names such as Karen O, Rivers Cuomo, Jamie xx, Panda Bear, and Haruomi Hosono with emerging talents like British rapper John Glacier and Tunisian footwork producer Khadija Al Hanafi. The album also showcases pioneering electronic composer Suzanne Ciani, who appears both musically and through sampled television material.
In addition to the album and film, the Avalanches created fictional products—such as the Superfun console and a soda called El Dorado—complete with their own jingles and advertisements, some voiced by Osment. This multimedia approach underscores the duo’s fascination with the intersections of memory, nostalgia, and consumer culture.
Despite the logistical and financial challenges of securing sample clearances in the current music industry landscape, Chater and Di Blasi remain committed to their craft. They describe the creative process as a journey, driven by discovery and the desire to evoke the “humanness in the sounds” they sample. When asked about the difficulty of the process, Chater expressed doubts about continuing to work with sampled material, but the pair admitted they had already begun experimenting with new ideas.
*No Bad Memories* arrives as a vivid, layered testament to the Avalanches’ ongoing evolution, balancing deep archival exploration with playful, forward-looking creativity.