The Avalanches are the kind of band that take twenty years to perfect an idea, then act surprised when it comes out sounding like the universe itself. Their third record, We Will Always Love You, is less an album than a séance in orbit—voices of the dead, floating radio waves, the Voyager Golden Record, Elvis and Tammy Wynette bouncing through the cosmos. “It was an internal journey,” Robbie Chater says. “We were reflecting on our mortality. Darkness to light. What happens when we die.”
And because they’re The Avalanches, that inward spiral immediately became a macro-cosmic one. Tony Di Blasi grins about the rabbit hole: “I love reading how every radio broadcast from Earth is still floating out there. Elvis’s voice, Lennon’s, Tammy Wynette’s… Donald Trump’s too, unfortunately. Somebody needs to mute that one.”
As sample magicians, summoning ghosts is their default job description. Old records become spirit mediums, chopped and looped until they breathe again. “If we’re sampling very old recordings of singers who’ve long since passed, it’s almost like we’re summoning spirits,” Robbie says. “So we started thinking about what the human voice means, the vibration of it.”
Not exactly light subject matter, but then they brought friends: Leon Bridges (both sampled and singing, one of the few who can claim that double honor), Johnny Marr, Perry Farrell, Blood Orange, Kurt Vile, even Mick Jones of The Clash. “I mentioned Big Audio Dynamite in an email,” Robbie says. “He never replied.” Avalanches lore now includes being ghosted by the very man whose DNA they carry.
Tony admits corralling all these collaborators required more than vague stoner talk about vibes. “Robbie actually wrote a thesis about the themes,” he says. “He’d send that to people. Some artists got it right away. Some said, ‘Man, you guys are out of your minds. Maybe next time.’”
The irony is that for all the astral chatter, this record might be their most straightforward collection of songs. “We told ourselves we couldn’t take sixteen years again,” Robbie laughs. “We thought, let’s just write eight really good pop songs. But of course we ended up with 25 tracks, flowing together.” The difference is they nailed the pop part this time. “We’re just getting better,” he shrugs. “There are a lot of great songs on this one.”
When they take it on tour, they want to show their work. “We’ll be pulling the songs apart and revealing the component parts, then building them back up in front of people,” Tony says. “Bringing it back to the art form of sampling.”
It’s equal parts séance and DJ set, voices of the living and dead stitched into something brand new. The Avalanches, still chasing signals through the static.
Watch the full interview above and then check out the videos below.
