The Avalanches have a new album on the way. The follow-up to 2020’s We Will Always Love You is called No Bad Memories, and it’s out on October 16 via Modular. Here’s everything we know so far.
When did the Avalanches start dropping hints of a new album?
The first teaser came just a year after the release of their last album, with the band writing “Album #4” on Facebook and checking in at “Planet Earth.” They took to social media to hint at the album again in 2023, posting, “What do you imagine the next Avalanches album to sound like?”
The teasers started feeling more concrete last fall, when the group shared a photo of a pile of LaCie Rugged drives. More recently, they revealed a new logo on Instagram after wiping their profile clean. And now, as Stereogum reports, they’re rolling out the album via a fictional company called Takumi, whose mascot is a purple cat flying around on a broomstick. An animated ad promoting it first appeared on platforms including Spotify and YouTube before surfacing on the Takumi Digital Archives Instagram. All the way back in December, the Avalanches shared photos of actor Haley Joel Osment wearing a uniform that featured the Takumi logo.
What does Takumi do?
The company offers clients the opportunity to upload their memories, particularly of old commercials. “Our new TAKUMI data centre is now operational,” reads the caption on one post. “The 155,000ft fault tolerant facility comprises 1,800 computing cores, three petabytes of high-density racks and 36 superchips with low-latency networking. A world first in Non-Volatile storage solutions. At Takumi, your memories are safe with us.”
There’s also an accompanying website full of fake vintage magazine covers and retro ads, which might be hinting at song titles. Adding to the nostalgic aesthetic are images of CDs, cassettes, floppy disks, VHS, and USB drives. There are also prompts like “I remember… we were at the club?” and other text that could be glimpses of song lyrics.
What have the Avalanches said about the new album?
“It’s been interesting as adults to reflect on this often stunning period of marketing – the creativity, filmmaking, photography and music – but which was also – you know, selling a completely unobtainable dream,” the band said in a press release announcing the record. “The way we value devices and products; the way we reflect and represent ‘a life lived’; the wonder of memory and deep power of nostalgia, especially in sound. Revisiting imagery and jingles from childhood and realizing how profoundly they have stuck… Taking these sound sources from within the heart of this kinda corporate framework and flipping the fragments into our own kind of joyous pop music … eventually we arrived at this world of No Bad Memories.”
Have the Avalanches released any singles from the album?
On May 14, the Avalanches returned with a new single, ‘Together’. The trio of Robbie Chater, Tony Di Blasi, and Andy Szekeres made the ebullient track in collaboration with Nikki Nair, Jessy Lanza, and Prentiss. On June 5, they followed it up with ‘Every Single Weekend’, an extended version of the collaboration that initially appeared on Jamie xx’s 2024 album In Waves. To accompany the album announcement, they shared ‘Can’t Get Over Losing You’, a collaboration with Portraits of Tracy.
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