The Avalanches are finally set to drop their long-long-long-awaited new album, Wildflower, tomorrow, which means the band are currently on the promotional circuit. No doubt they’re already sick of answering the same single question: what took so long?
“We went through seven shades of s**t to make this record,” Tony Di Blasi, one third of the legendary Sydney plunderphonics crew, recently told News Corp, and he’s not wrong. The band haven’t just been twiddling their thumbs for the past 16 years.
According to Di Blasi and bandmate Robbie Chater, the road to Wildflower has been long and winding. Along the way, lawsuits, health scares, label issues, and even Empire of the Sun conspired to delay the release of the sequel to one of Australia’s favourite albums.
“We basically were always making music,” Chater told News Corp. “Since I Left You had such a staggered release, it was pre-internet, we were still touring that album across the US in 2003, by the time we got back we were pretty worn out, nothing happened for a while after that.”
“We worked on an animation project for two years, it doesn’t have a name, that was supposed to be the second record, a psychedelic hip hop record,” he added. “It was gonna be accompanied by a traditional hand-drawn cell animated film, like a hip hop Yellow Submarine.”
“That was a tonne of work and storyboarding and it was written and ready to go … then funding fell through at the last minute,” Chater explained, adding that the band intends to find a way to release the film eventually.
“We made a whole bunch of stuff with Luke Steele from Sleepy Jackson, singer songwriter, stuff, droney, full-on psychedelic stuff. He was coming over from Perth a lot, it was really beautiful…”, Chater recounted.
“Then he made Empire Of the Sun and that [took off]. All that music is still hanging around. Time flew by. It wasn’t that different a process to making Since I Left You, like I said we’re always making stuff.”
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“We did other things along the way like music for [musical] King Kong and that remix of Hunters and Collector’s ‘Talking To a Stranger’,” said Chater, who also experienced a health scare which also contributed to the delay of the new album.
“I was diagnosed with a couple of different auto-immune diseases. That laid me low for a couple of years. It’s not something I really wanna go into, it’s part of … Moi ownnn life ya knowww,” Chater told News Corp.
Wildflower drops tomorrow and it’s already scored a rave review from Tone Deaf’s Nigel Moyes, who stated emphatically that the record was more than worth the wait. You can check out the review over here.
