The Avalanches - No Bad Memories (2026)
just a small little sign - october 17, 2026
In 2009, I became aware of the internet that was being left behind for the first time. Yahoo was on its downswing after buying up half of the cool things on the web, and was now cutting costs by mulching much of the past 15 years of online history. The biggest casualty was GeoCities, host to millions of user-generated websites. I hadn’t heard of GeoCities before, being a child, but that did not matter. A core pillar (by 2009, a husk of itself, of course, but still there) of the digital experience was being actively executed before my eyes, and with it went a million sources of human expression. At the same time, I was being exposed to all the ways you could connect with others through the internet. All the friends I can make, all the communities I can join, all the potential ahead for what this space could end up becoming. It is now 2026, and The Avalanches make their return with a nod towards this young me, gazing nervously at both the past and the future, and present a much more jaded iteration of that boy with No Bad Memories.
The Avalanches are fundamentally incapable of making a record that isn’t deep, shining, pure happiness. Every long-awaited return is another wild trip, another crazy party, whether it’s the all-expenses cruise of Since I Left You or catching a radio wave into space on We Will Always Love You. No crevice is left unexplored in the soundscapes they build and then compact into an hour of music. The one I keep returning to more and more, though, is Wildflower. There are few albums more eager to toy with your sense of nostalgia than their long-delayed 2016 return, constructing a road trip through an idealized, psychedelic, wonderland America that felt so unreal and, yet, very distinctly there. It’s a space you could have sworn you’ve seen, even though it’s never been. After another agonizing 6-year-long wait (because every album’s an odyssey, I guess,) No Bad Memories once again goes full throttle on nostalgia. This time, though, it’s to a place the Avalanches helped construct. This album is a vacation to that decade between Windows 95 and Windows Vista. It’s a wormhole to a world where the internet is the Wild West and the future holds infinite possibilities. A world of color and creativity, racing by you at the speed of sound. A world with which I find myself familiar and absolutely fascinated.
Despite pulling at some of the same emotional strings as Wildflower, No Bad Memories runs in the complete opposite stylistic direction. Compared to the fuzziness the group has dabbled heavily with in the past, this thing runs at a fever pitch. Matching the intense, vibrant nature of the culture (and advertising) of the turn of the millennium, the Avalanches take a hard swerve into their most straightforwardly danceable material in a long, long time. This is a venue where the seats look like rounded-off triangles and the lighting looks like it’s from an alien mothership. It’s noticeably got a bit of a trigger finger, too, taking a mallet to the group's typical song-and-interlude structure. Barely anything is over three minutes here, and while it means that there are some very good ideas that might not get their full time to develop, there’s enough juice overall to keep you chasing another high in just another minute or two. When it does settle in on a vibe, though, it’s pure elation. Tracks like “Can’t Get Over Losing You” and “Our Love is Alive” carry that ancient magic in spades to remind you of just why you fell in love with these guys in the first place. And then the channel changes again, and you’re cast off into another little adventure.
Along the way, the Avalanches carry influences with them that, for the first time, they seem to have directly inspired. It’s easy to catch the vapor here, weaved into a lot of the interludes and more hypnotic tracks, and the way they toy with synthlines and certain vocals can feel like something straight out of the R Plus Seven era of Oneohtrix Point Never’s catalogue (hell, he’s even in one of the album’s teaser trailers.) Things get warped real fast in these moments, and at times it feels like the group takes quite the delight in shoving your head into neon incoherence before you get pulled right back out again as the next beat revs up. Rather striking is the usage of the material built up during the promotion of the album, with corporations like Takumi, Superfun and El Dorado, to inject some really fun alternate-universe flavor. Some of the taglines and commercial snippets feel like excerpts from cut sections of Hypnospace Outlaw. It’s got a warmth and tenderness that comes from a group fully recognizing their influences on the development of vapor via plunderphonics, and their embracement of that sound in return. Everything ends up dripping with pure, unabashed, giddy nostalgia.
But, you know… nostalgia is a tricky thing to get a handle on. It must be understood that any past you attempt to return to is a construct in your mind built to cope with the ills of the world now. This has been the case for all of human history, and falling back into it too hard can be brand worship at best and disastrous at worst. The Avalanches seem to recognize that this past is imagined. Everything seems just a bit too bright, the energy seems a little too nervous (see the lyrical spiral on “Together”), they're not really praying to any corporation more than trying to construct that weird, sticky, infectious role they play in this new weird nostalgia. Still, the feeling is real. I used to believe the future would be better, and we'd be able to make it better. I even thought I'd be able to play a part in that more optimistic world. Now we (or, at least, my particular cohort) are just left wondering what the fuck happened. All I can do is look back to the world that faded away when I was a kid that I’ve been grasping for ever since. Somewhere on an old virus-infested laptop is 650 gigabytes of GeoCities. My primary online presence is designed to look like a professional website from 2004. This album was made for me, and yet, I am faced with this realization: I will never be the picture me again.
…And I think that was what I wanted this album to be about. For whatever reason, I wanted this to be a downer. However, the Avalanches are fundamentally incapable of making a record that isn’t deep, shining, pure happiness. Even if it takes sideways glances at times, it’s so goofy that you’re smiling stupid anyway. The first track hits you with the Mario Paint cat sound effect, I can take a stab that No Bad Memories would much rather have you party than navel gaze. So I think I’ll simply party. Sure, the past I yearn for did not exist… but it’s fun to explore the spaces created by its remembrance regardless. I still love this saccharine world of 8-point Tahoma font and joyous-looking fruits in basins of water. I love my stupid faux-internet 1.0 website and the stupid real internet 1.0 websites that fueled its design. I love the memories, deep in the back of my mind, that this album calls forward by name and warmly embraces. And I love the fuck out of all my friends online. All these things build a little world in which it feels like the future might actually be worth something again. It’s hopeful in here. It might only be a fleeting feeling from the past, but it’s warm. It’s there. It’s real.
No Bad Memories feels like a night with a hyperactive robotic DJ with a million ideas, a deep desire to launch you out of a blobject cannon at a million miles every minute, and both a somewhat noticeable anxiety and a still-burning, deep-seated optimism for that which still lies ahead. It manages to do what the Avalanches do best, building a full chrome-painted, vapor-tinged funhouse for you to sink your teeth into and explore. It’s another wild, chaotic, celebratory rager from the best guys to ever throw them. Besides, the night’s not over and we’re not exhausted yet, so get in. Let yourself fall into the dialtones and melt into the Bondi Blue plastic while you still can. You have enough to fret about missing out on, and, who knows, it might just be the best time of your life.
running brightest_light