The Avalanches No Bad Memories: The Australian duo’s 31-track opus features Karen O, Jamie xx, and Carly Simon alongside sampled jingles and floppy-disk ads, landing an 82 Metacritic.
The Avalanches’ ‘No Bad Memories’ represents the Melbourne electronic duo’s most ambitious statement yet. The fourth studio album arrives as a 31-track behemoth that pulls from an almost obscene range of sonic source material: vintage commercial jingles, floppy-disk startup sounds, and a guest roster that reads like a curated festival lineup. The record has landed an 82 Metacritic score, positioning it as one of the year’s most acclaimed releases and a career peak for a band that already redefined sample-based production across multiple decades.
What makes ‘No Bad Memories’ remarkable isn’t just its scope or the caliber of its collaborators. The album functions as a kind of internet-age archaeology project, mining the detritus of digital culture and pre-streaming consumer technology for moments of unexpected emotional weight. Karen O appears across the record’s architecture, her voice cutting through textures of ambient hum and chopped-up dialogue. Jamie xx contributes his signature melodic sensibility, while Carly Simon’s presence grounds stretches of the album in a more traditional songwriting language. Between these high-profile moments sit deeper cuts built from the kind of forgotten audio artifacts most producers would discard: the sonic texture of obsolete hardware, the rhythm of commercial breaks, the ghost frequencies of a pre-smartphone world.
The Avalanches have spent their entire career proving that sampling isn’t about interpolation of canonical tracks. It’s about finding music and meaning in overlooked moments, transforming the everyday into the transcendent. ‘No Bad Memories’ pushes that thesis further than ever, and cements The Avalanches’ position as architects of contemporary electronic production. The album packs nearly two hours of material with the kind of detail-obsessive craftsmanship that rewards repeated listening and reinforces why this record is truly the album of the season.
