The Avalanches Walk You Through Their 'Deeply Positive' New Album

The new record from The Avalanches, We Will Always Love You intends to ‘elevate rather than intoxicate’, and its epic tracklisting does just that, and then some.

The Aussie legends’ highly anticipated third studio album builds on the classic sounds of Since I Left You and Wildflower and steps boldly into new terrain with a star-studded list of guest appearances in tow.

The wealth of collaborators, including MGMT, Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo, Denzel Curry, Johnny Marr, Neneh Cherry, Sampa the Great and more, have helped The Avalanches deliver “their most song-oriented album yet”.

What we're saying... 

★★★★
Review by Guido Farnell. Read the full review here.

“Produced over the past four years, We Will Always Love You takes inspiration from Ann Druyan, her relationship with Carl Sagan and work co-ordinating the Voyager Golden Records as a starting point for this record.

“It is anyone’s guess what aliens will make of the recordings Druyan sent into the depths of space, but The Avalanches take this inspiration to deliver an album of soft grooves that smoothly glides through the cosmos.

“This album’s hazy and sampled vibe has been designed to sound like a broadcast from a distant planet Earth. These short pop songs are glued together by electronic instrumentals and makes them sound like someone impatiently flipping radio stations.

“The Avalanches have produced a collection of songs that bristle with emotion and quite soulfully pushes out deeply positive messages of love and hope.”

What they're saying...

To celebrate the release of their new album, The Avalanches take us behind-the-scenes of We Will Always Love You via this exclusive track by track.

Ghost Story (feat. Orono)

“Orono sent us an amazing phone recording from when she was about 14 – a really embarrassing message she left on her boyfriend’s answering machine asking him not to break up with her – and said we could use it if we wanted. It didn’t really fit but that gave us the idea of doing a similar kind of recording. I love the idea of hearing someone who’s passed away, but there’s still a message left on the answer machine before they left this world.”

Song For Barbara Payton

“Her story really resonated with me – it’s heartbreaking really. The lyrics in the sample we found seemed to sum up her life. I’d been looking at images of Payton for a possible album cover, but when we didn’t go down that path, it just seemed like a nice way to acknowledge her.”

We Will Always Love You (feat. Blood Orange)

“We did something with Tricky for this album and it sounded similar – I really love that British style.”

The Divine Chord (feat. MGMT and Johnny Marr)

“MGMT are just beautiful songwriters. I was lucky enough to hang out in Los Angeles, where Andrew VanWyngarden is, for quite a while over the last couple of years and do some recording. I think he was going through a heartbreak so that sense of loss, it’s captured in the song.”

Solitary Ceremonies


“After-images of VanWyngarden’s vocal waver through this interstitial track.”

Interstellar Love (feat. Leon Bridges)


“Leon is an incredible singer, with just the most beautiful voice. He’s from Texas but we both happened to be in LA at the same time, which was lucky as he was on my all time wish list. When we were in the studio, I told him the story about Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan and how her love-struck brain waves were sent out into space on the Voyager’s Golden Record. And this song came out of that.”

Ghost Story Pt 2 (feat. Leon Bridges and Orono)

“I liked the idea of a left-over bit of a phone call, from the other side.”

Reflecting Light (feat. Sananda Maitreya and Vashti Bunyman)

“[Sananda Maitreya and I] have had a beautiful two-year friendship, he still writes to me nearly every day – the most wonderful long rambling emails about life and love and the music industry. We had the sample first and then worked with Sananda writing around it. But we gave the appearance credit because we wanted to acknowledge Vashti’s role.”

Carrier Waves


“Another glinting interlude of spacy electronics and wordless vocal.”

Oh The Sunn! (feat. Perry Farrell)

“Perry’s full of positivity and light. That was another wonderful LA experience - recording at his home, where he lives with his wife and kids and all their dogs. Although still a gentle glide of a groove, this is the first really danceable tune on the album, finding that zone where The Avalanches and Daft Punk have much in common.”

We Go On (feat. Cola Boyy and Mick Jones)

“[Cola Boyy’s] very passionate about his local community, about life, an activist, outspoken - so I loved having him on the same record as Mick Jones.”

Star Song.IMG


“10-second miniature bleepscape redolent of early Sixties electronic pioneers Kid Baltan and BBC Radiophonic Workshop. When run through a spectrograph, the distorted tones form a static realistic image of the actress Barbara Payton.”

Until Daylight Comes (feat. Tricky)

“We worked on about six or seven songs together, corresponding on Instagram at first, and then started recording. Tricky would just ask for more and more music. It was a runaway couple of weeks in which we did about six songs and then I got an email from my manager saying ‘are you working with Tricky? I’ve just got a very concerned email from his manager saying you guys have recorded half the album already!’. Nobody knew anything about it. These particular vocals of Tricky’s were recorded for a different song, but then I brought them into this other context.”

Wherever You Go (feat. Jamie xx, Neneh Cherry and CLYPSO)

“Jamie pushed it to that higher tempo in the second half. I was sending Jamie lots of music but for some reason he just loved that song and felt it needed to go faster at the end. It almost felt like a remix and that it shouldn’t be on the album. But then reworked his reworking and it fit fine.”

Music Makes Me High

“There’s a gospel choir on there, but very softly in the mix, singing over the ‘music makes me high’ sample.”

Pink Champagne


“A very brief interstitial, in which Pink Siifu's dislocated voice informs us that ‘the sky was pink champagne’ as thunder crackles distantly on the horizon.”

Take Care In Your Dreaming (feat. Denzel Curry, Tricky and Sampa the Great)


“Denzel Curry happened to be in Sydney and things lined up perfectly. It all happened in a single day. We had ‘take care in your dreaming and love when you can’ already and we spoke with Denzel about unrealised dreams and journeys through life. So that’s what he wrote about. It’s been quite harrowing for him at times, I understand. The song is a ‘careful what you wish for’ kind of thing.”

Overcome

“I guess it’s those parallel lines – rave music and gospel music are both a collective reaching for something higher, an attempt to transcend.” 

Gold Sky (feat. Kurt Vile)

“We spoke and then Kurt came up with the overall concept. That’s why I’m so grateful for the whole experience of making this record - people were so open to talking about where we were headed and diving in in such an open-hearted way.” The song closes with a poignant refrain courtesy of the Flaming Lip's Wayne Coyne.

Always Black (feat. Pink Siifu)

“The skittering drums are among the most inventive beat-work on the album. It was that thing where it’s a sketch beat – we were like, ‘we’ll write this properly later’ – but it ends up staying.”

Dial D For Devotion (feat. Karen O)


“A brief, bittersweet interstitial featuring the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ singer intoning lyric shards from the late David Berman of Silver Jews: ‘The light of my life is going out tonight/without a flicker of regret.’”

Running Red Lights (feat. Rivers Cuomo and Pink Siifu)

“Rivers is so funny - he heard the music, he has a spreadsheet of all his best phrases that he’s kicking around at that moment, so his assistant sent it to us and said ‘you can choose one’. We thought we’d get greedy and chose three – and he said ‘okay,’ and sent us the lyrics back.”

Born To Lose


“Riding a fluid, jazzy bassline sampled from Leon Bridges, this gorgeous golden groove is a bit like the ‘mature’ version of the classic Avalanches style circa Since I Left You.”

Music Is The Light (feat. Cornelius and Kelly Moran)

“We wanted to start the record with that sentiment, ‘music is the light’, but then it got to be too many slow songs at the front of the album, so it got shuffled to near the end.”

Weightless

“Frank Drake is famous for the Drake Equation, which calculated the number of possible habitable planets in galaxies that we know about and from that estimates the likelihood of there being intelligent civilisations. We did a performance with the International Space Orchestra, which is a bunch of a scientists from NASA and the SETI Institute who are also musicians. 

“They put us in touch with Frank, who’s 90 now, and he sent us the original file for the Arecibo Message. We got that converted into MIDI notes, keeping the same rate of broadcast but deciding what the notes actually were and the sound in which they were played. And that’s what you hear on Weightless - that original actual message to the aliens that might be out there, converted into sound for the first time.”