{"id":119434,"date":"2026-10-26T00:11:38","date_gmt":"2026-10-26T04:11:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=119434"},"modified":"2026-10-26T00:11:38","modified_gmt":"2026-10-26T04:11:38","slug":"the-avalanches-no-bad-memories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/entertainment\/music\/the-avalanches-no-bad-memories\/","title":{"rendered":"The Avalanches Built 31 Tracks From Other People&#8217;s Records"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='booster-block booster-read-block'>\n                <div class=\"twp-read-time\">\n                \t<i class=\"booster-icon twp-clock\"><\/i> <span>Read Time:<\/span>8 Minute, 59 Second                <\/div>\n\n            <\/div><p>The Avalanches&#8217; <em>No Bad Memories<\/em> arrived on 16 October 2026. It is their fourth album, and it packs 31 separate tracks into roughly 52 minutes. Several of them are over before you have finished deciding how you feel about them.<\/p>\n\n<p>Here is the part worth sitting with. Most of what you hear on it began life inside somebody else&#8217;s recording.<\/p>\n\n<p>That is not a complaint. It is the whole method, it is why the record exists, and it is why people are talking about it.<\/p>\n\n<h2>The Avalanches No Bad Memories: What It Is Made Of<\/h2>\n\n<p>The Avalanches are two men from Melbourne, Australia \u2014 Robbie Chater and Tony Di Blasi. For more than twenty-five years their instrument has been other people&#8217;s music. They find a sound, lift it out, and set it beside another sound that was never meant to sit anywhere near it.<\/p>\n\n<p>For the earlier records, that meant digging through crates of second-hand vinyl. This time a lot of the hunting moved online, and into a stranger kind of archive: advertising jingles, the little start-up chimes old machines used to make, the adverts that played between children&#8217;s television programmes.<\/p>\n\n<p>The band has said that going back through the jingles and images of their own childhood made them realise how deeply those things had stuck \u2014 and that looking at the marketing they grew up inside was impressive and troubling at once. An album built out of adverts is a slightly uncomfortable idea, because it means admitting that the adverts worked. Those jingles are still in there, decades later, taking up space that something else could have had. That is <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/health-and-wellness\/what-is-nostalgia\/\">how nostalgia actually operates<\/a> \u2014 it does not ask your permission about what it keeps.<\/p>\n\n<p>Threaded through all of it is a long list of guests. Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs sings on one track. Jamie xx turns up on another.<\/p>\n\n<div class=\"convertkit-form wp-block-convertkit-form\" style=\"\"><script async data-uid=\"6491fb8269\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.kit.com\/6491fb8269\/index.js\" data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\" data-no-defer=\"1\" data-no-optimize=\"1\" nowprocket><\/script><\/div>\n\n\n<h2>31 Tracks Is Not the Unusual Part<\/h2>\n\n<p>Thirty-one sounds like a mistake. It is not even a change for this band. Their previous album, <em>We Will Always Love You<\/em>, had 25. The density is simply how they build: short pieces, interludes, fragments that hand off to each other rather than stand alone.<\/p>\n\n<p>Reviewers noticed the weight of it. NME called the album a manic listen even by this band&#8217;s own standards and said 31 tracks in 52 minutes leaves it <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nme.com\/reviews\/album\/the-avalanches-no-bad-memories-review-3973070\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">full to bursting<\/a>, with changes of direction that get frustrating in places. The reception has still been warm. Nobody is arguing that the band ran out of ideas.<\/p>\n\n<p>What actually changed is not the track count. It is the source material. A record made of old soul and disco records is a love letter to music. A record made of jingles is something else \u2014 a love letter to the commercial break, which is a much odder thing to feel affection for. The music industry has always been better at <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/entertainment\/music\/platinum-record-turns-50\/\">inventing new ways to measure success<\/a> than at noticing what it quietly taught people to remember.<\/p>\n\n<h2>Somebody Has to Say Yes<\/h2>\n\n<p>This is the part that almost never makes the review, and it is the most interesting thing about how this band works.<\/p>\n\n<p>When you build a song out of other people&#8217;s recordings, you cannot simply release it. Every borrowed piece needs permission. Someone has to find out who owns it, ask, and often pay.<\/p>\n\n<p>Their first album, <em>Since I Left You<\/em>, is the famous case. Chater has put the number of samples on it at somewhere around 3,500. Clearance was obtained for roughly 900 of them, the band brought in a specialist to handle it, and the release was held up over it. Not everything could be cleared \u2014 which is why the Australian version of that album and the British and American versions are not the same record. A Rodgers and Hammerstein sample in the opening had to come out. If you grew up with that album, the version you know depends on where you were standing.<\/p>\n\n<p>Twenty-five years later it has got harder, not easier. Chater has said <em>No Bad Memories<\/em> was particularly difficult to clear. Speaking to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.musicradar.com\/artists\/sampling-is-our-art-form-weve-accepted-that-were-not-going-to-make-loads-of-money-from-record-sales-the-avalanches-on-why-clearing-samples-is-harder-than-ever-working-with-jamie-xx-and-swapping-hardware-samplers-for-pro-tools\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">MusicRadar<\/a>, the band put it plainly: sampling is their art form, and they have accepted that they are not going to make much money from record sales.<\/p>\n\n<p>Read that again, because it inverts the usual story. We tend to assume that borrowing is the cheap route and originality is the expensive one. Here it is the reverse. These two have spent a quarter of a century paying \u2014 in money, in years, in music that had to be cut \u2014 for the right to credit everyone they took from. The borrowing is not the shortcut. The borrowing is the bill.<\/p>\n\n<h2>Why It Holds Together Anyway<\/h2>\n\n<p>If none of the sounds are yours, what exactly did you make?<\/p>\n\n<p>The answer is the only thing nobody else could have done: the choosing. Which four seconds out of a four-minute song. What it gets placed next to. Which order. When to let a fragment finish and when to cut it off halfway. Thousands of small decisions, none of which exist in any of the source material, and all of which are unmistakably theirs. Hand the same 3,500 samples to anyone else and you would not get this record. You would not get anything like it.<\/p>\n\n<p>There is a specific, quiet fear that comes with making anything at all out of what you inherited. The suspicion that if you traced every part of your work back far enough, you would find none of it started with you \u2014 your style came from someone you admired, your ideas came from things you read, even the way you talk came from the people who raised you. Most people who make things carry some version of that worry. It has a name now, and it is <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/do-i-have-imposter-syndrome\/\">more common than almost anyone admits<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n<p>What is strange is how new that fear is. For most of human history, nobody expected to invent from nothing, and nobody thought less of them for it. The teacher at the centre of the Christian story taught almost entirely in quotation \u2014 his sentences are stitched through with texts that were already centuries old when he spoke them, and the people listening did not hear that as thin. They heard it as authority. And the highest praise in that tradition does not go to the person who makes something from nothing. It goes to the one who can reach into a storehouse of what has been handed down and bring out both the old thing and the new thing, and know which one the moment in front of them actually needs.<\/p>\n\n<p>That is a different measure of worth than originality, and a far kinder one. God made you to be a particular kind of chooser. Nobody else has stood exactly where you are standing, holding exactly what you were handed.<\/p>\n\n<h2>Listen for the Seams<\/h2>\n\n<p>Put the record on and try to hear the joins. For a while you will catch them \u2014 a jingle surfacing, a voice from an advert, something that sounds like it is coming through a wall from 1987. Then at some point you stop noticing, and it is simply a song, and it is doing to you what songs do.<\/p>\n\n<p>That moment is the whole argument. Not one note of it had to be new for it to be real.<\/p>\n\n<h2>Questions People Ask About No Bad Memories<\/h2>\n\n<h3>When was The Avalanches&#8217; No Bad Memories released?<\/h3>\n\n<p><em>No Bad Memories<\/em>, the fourth studio album by the Australian group The Avalanches, was released on 16 October 2026. It followed <em>We Will Always Love You<\/em> and was the band&#8217;s first album in roughly six years.<\/p>\n\n<h3>How many tracks are on No Bad Memories?<\/h3>\n\n<p><em>No Bad Memories<\/em> by The Avalanches contains 31 tracks, running to approximately 52 minutes in total. Many of those tracks are short interludes rather than full-length songs, which is why so many fit into under an hour. The band&#8217;s previous album, <em>We Will Always Love You<\/em>, had 25 tracks.<\/p>\n\n<h3>What is The Avalanches&#8217; No Bad Memories made of?<\/h3>\n\n<p><em>No Bad Memories<\/em> is built largely from samples \u2014 short pieces of existing recordings. Alongside music, The Avalanches drew on the audio leftovers of mass media: advertising jingles, electronic start-up chimes, and adverts from children&#8217;s television. The band has described revisiting the jingles of their own childhood and realising how deeply those sounds had lodged in memory. Guest contributors on the album include Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Jamie xx.<\/p>\n\n<h3>Why is clearing music samples so difficult?<\/h3>\n\n<p>Every sample used in a released record normally needs legal permission from whoever owns the original recording and the composition. That means identifying the owner, negotiating, and usually paying. On The Avalanches&#8217; debut <em>Since I Left You<\/em>, clearance was obtained for roughly 900 samples, the release was delayed because of it, and some samples could not be cleared at all \u2014 so the Australian edition differs from the British and American ones. Robbie Chater of The Avalanches has said clearance has become harder over time, and that <em>No Bad Memories<\/em> was particularly difficult to clear.<\/p>\n\n<h3>Does using samples mean the music is not original?<\/h3>\n\n<p>Sample-based music is generally treated as original work, because the creative decisions sit in the selection and arrangement rather than in the raw sounds. Which fragment is chosen, what it is placed beside, in what order, and for how long are choices that do not exist in any of the source recordings. Two producers given identical source material will produce entirely different records.<\/p>\n\n<h2>What Do You Think?<\/h2>\n\n<p>Does a song still count as original if every single sound in it came from somewhere else \u2014 or does the choosing count as making? Leave a comment and say where you land on that, because reasonable people land in very different places.<\/p>\n\n<div class=\"convertkit-form wp-block-convertkit-form\" style=\"\"><script async data-uid=\"6491fb8269\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.kit.com\/6491fb8269\/index.js\" data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\" data-no-defer=\"1\" data-no-optimize=\"1\" nowprocket><\/script><\/div>\n\n\n<h2>Share This<\/h2>\n\n<ul>\n<li>The Avalanches put 31 tracks on their new album and almost nothing in it is a new sound. It&#8217;s assembled out of old records and childhood TV adverts. And it&#8217;s good. Turns out originality was never the measure. https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/entertainment\/music\/the-avalanches-no-bad-memories\/<\/li>\n<li>Learned today that The Avalanches&#8217; first album had about 3,500 samples in it, only around 900 got cleared, and the version you grew up with depends which country you were in. Borrowing isn&#8217;t the cheap route \u2014 it&#8217;s the bill. https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/entertainment\/music\/the-avalanches-no-bad-memories\/<\/li>\n<li>An album made entirely out of advertising jingles is an uncomfortable idea, because it means admitting the jingles worked. 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Why that is the point, and what permission cost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":119433,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_wp_convertkit_post_meta":{"form":"-1","landing_page":"0","tag":"0","restrict_content":"0"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[788],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119434"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":119435,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119434\/revisions\/119435"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/119433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}