The Avalanches are returning with their first album in six years—and this time, they are searching inside the sounds that corporations placed in people’s minds.
The Australian electronic group announced No Bad Memories on Thursday, 6 August 2026. The ambitious 31-track record will arrive on 16 October, following the group’s 2020 album We Will Always Love You.
For decades, The Avalanches have built music by collecting forgotten sounds and rearranging them into unexpected emotional experiences. Their new project extends that method into the world of advertising and consumer technology.
Commercial jingles, electronic start-up tones, old audio logos and other sounds associated with branded products have influenced the album’s central idea. These brief pieces of audio were originally created to sell something or make a device recognisable, but repeated exposure allowed them to become connected with childhood, family life and particular periods of history.
The group began considering how such sounds can remain inside a person’s memory long after the advertisement has disappeared or the technology has become obsolete. No Bad Memories takes fragments from that corporate environment and transforms them into new pop compositions.
Its title suggests that remembering is not a neutral process. A cheerful sound from an old advertisement may create feelings of comfort and nostalgia even when the company behind it was simply trying to influence consumer behaviour.
New Single Introduces a Rising Louisiana Artist
The announcement arrived with “Can’t Get Over Losing You,” a new collaboration with Portraits of Tracy, the musical identity of Louisiana artist Tracy Amare.
The song combines driving drums, carefully arranged samples and an uplifting melody with Amare’s vocal performance. Although its sound carries the energy of a celebration, the title introduces an undercurrent of absence and emotional difficulty.
Work on the track reportedly began in 2024 before it was rerecorded and completed in 2025. It is accompanied by an animated music video created by visual artist Jonathan Zawada, a frequent collaborator whose surreal imagery has helped define the visual world surrounding the new album.
“Can’t Get Over Losing You” is the fourth preview of the record. Other previously released songs expected to appear on No Bad Memories include “Blue Shadows” with Karen O, “Every Single Weekend” with Jamie xx, and “Together,” featuring Jessy Lanza, Nikki Nair and Prentiss.
The complete 31-song track listing has not yet been publicly revealed.
The Masters of Musical Reconstruction Return
The Avalanches currently consist of Robbie Chater, Tony Di Blasi and Andy Szekeres. The group became internationally influential through its 2000 debut album, Since I Left You, which demonstrated how thousands of seemingly unrelated samples could be assembled into a continuous musical world.
Rather than using sampling merely to decorate conventional songs, The Avalanches treat recorded sound as raw material. Voices, drums, film dialogue and forgotten melodies can be removed from their original settings and given completely different emotional meanings.
That approach makes advertising a natural subject for the group. Commercials are designed to make sounds unforgettable, while The Avalanches specialise in rescuing familiar fragments and asking listeners to hear them differently.
Why This Matters
No Bad Memories arrives during a period when technology companies increasingly use carefully designed sounds to create emotional relationships with their products. A phone notification, gaming-console start-up tone or computer alert can become closely connected to a person’s work, friendships and private life.
The album therefore raises an unusual question: How much of what people remember as personal nostalgia was actually designed by a marketing department?
By turning commercial fragments into independent music, The Avalanches are attempting to reclaim those memories. Sounds once intended to advertise products are being dismantled and rebuilt as art.
The project also represents a major return for one of electronic music’s most distinctive groups. With 31 tracks and an expanding list of international collaborators, No Bad Memories appears designed as an entire world rather than a conventional collection of songs.
