A Fourth Act Built From Commercial Echoes
The Avalanches’ album No Bad Memories is a fourth studio electronic music release built around the sounds, slogans, and jingles of consumer technology and advertising, turning those familiar fragments from mass marketing into a sprawling, sample-based pop world that questions how nostalgia and brand culture shape personal memory while still aiming to feel bright, melodic, and emotionally direct. This is not a modest comeback or a passive look back. The electronic trio have announced No Bad Memories, their fourth album, set for release on October 16th, and pre-orders for this project — which spans a total of 31 songs — are already underway. The concept is unapologetically loaded: advertising is both “magical and insidious,” an “unobtainable dream” that nonetheless imprints itself on our inner lives. The Avalanches seem intent on mining that tension rather than smoothing it over.
‘Can’t Get Over Losing You’: Nostalgia With Teeth
The new single “Can’t Get Over Losing You,” featuring Portraits of Tracy, is the clearest signal yet of how The Avalanches want No Bad Memories to feel in motion. This latest new single stream couples punchy drums with ethereal vocals, but it is the emotional tone that stands out: loss framed through the hazy glow of remembered sounds. The Avalanches describe taking jingles and audio logos lodged in childhood memory and “flipping the fragments into our own kind of joyous pop music,” a line that neatly captures the track’s bittersweet rush. Portraits of Tracy’s melodies and vocals thread delicacy through that conceptual weight, and Robbie Chater’s praise — calling Tracy a “generational talent” whose production, mixing, and songwriting “break my heart time after time” — is not mere politeness; the song leans on her presence to humanise its dense, referential sonics.
Advertising As Memory: The Album’s Risky Core
Where many electronic projects wrap themselves in vague retro signifiers, No Bad Memories takes aim at something more pointed: the way name-brand technology and commercial jingles wrap themselves around our memories. The group speaks of revisiting childhood imagery and realising how deeply those corporate sounds have stuck, then repurposing them into a “joyous pop” environment. It is an ambivalent ode, and that ambivalence matters. To treat advertising as pure kitsch would be easy; to admit its seductive craft and emotional power is harder. The Avalanches’ decision to build an entire album world from this material is a statement that marketing culture is not peripheral noise but central emotional infrastructure. Whether that feels cathartic or queasy will depend on the listener, but the concept forces a confrontation: if our warmest sonic memories are tethered to brands, what does nostalgia actually celebrate?
Thirty-One Tracks, Many Voices: Expansion, Not Retreat
The scale of No Bad Memories is striking. Pre-orders reveal the album apparently spans 31 songs, far beyond a lean electronic set. The advance releases show why the project needs that width: “Together,” “Every Single Weekend” with Jamie xx, “Blue Shadows” featuring Karen O, and now “Can’t Get Over Losing You” with Portraits of Tracy each sketch a different facet of the record’s sound. Instead of narrowing their focus, The Avalanches are courting a broad, pop-adjacent universe of collaborators, suggesting that the album is less a sealed concept piece and more a collage of voices circling the same question of memory and media. That choice carries risk — 31 tracks can be bloat or bounty — but it also signals confidence. This is the opposite of retreat into niche nostalgia; it is an attempt to meet contemporary electronic music’s pluralism on expansive terms.
What ‘No Bad Memories’ Signals For Electronic Music
No Bad Memories lands at a moment when electronic music is saturated with retro aesthetics, yet often vague about what, exactly, it is remembering. By centring advertising and trademark technology sounds, The Avalanches make that question explicit: our past is not only mixtapes and club nights, but boot-up chimes and brand jingles. The new album, due October 16th, positions itself as an electronic music release willing to admit that pop and corporate media share emotional territory. “Can’t Get Over Losing You” shows how that awareness can produce something immediate and melodic rather than academic, turning critique into a singable hook. If the full 31-track The Avalanches album follows through on this idea, it will stand as a reminder that confronting the commercial roots of our nostalgia does not drain its power; it might sharpen it. That is a provocative direction for both the trio and the wider scene.
