The follow-up to The Avalanches landmark debut Since I Left You is easily one of Australian music’s most highly anticipated albums. Though the Avalanches have periodically broken the silence recently on details about a new record, it appears that new material from the group will be arriving in just over a week courtesy of a new compilation album.
The Mushroom Group have rung the alarm on a new track from The Avalanches, stating ‘this is not a drill’ while announcing details of an “extraordinary album” that will feature music from the mash-up maestros alongside material from Mushroom’s own stable of artists, including Cloud Control, The Rubens, and Matt Corby & Missy Higgins, as The Music reports.
A new teaser website has been launched by Mushroom advertising the new compilation record, which has a few names already revealed across a calendar for the month of August, with The Avalanches tantalisingly placed at ‘Track 15’, with little other information except a countdown timer that reveals at 11pm on 8th August.
The Mushroom secret also comes as a surprise considering that The Avalanches are signed to Modular, though perhaps the nearly 15 year absence between 2000’s Since I Left You has meant a change of label for the group.
It was however a Modular insider that first confirmed that a “New Avalanches album out in February 2014. 30 songs done and mixed,” earlier this year, With a Guardian reported claiming they’d heard the new material noting “they sound exactly the same… but in a really GOOD way,” in a series of tweets. The Mushroom Group have rung the alarm on a new track from The Avalanches, stating ‘this is not a drill’
The posts – which surfaced in June – were promptly removed, no doubt at the request of Modular, with another tweet hinting that the group would be releasing a brand new single off the new album sometime in September.
There was more solid proof of a new album in the pipeline last August, when the group unceremoniously dropped a link to a tune called ‘A Cowboy Overflow Of The Heart’. The piece featured some abstract spoken word poetry over a distinctive Avalanches-styled soundscape of cheering children, light banjo, and twinkling xylophone, all under the warm crackle of hazy vinyl.
We also heard new material earlier this year after the mash up masters contributed a new track to the score of the King Kong musical, alongside French electronic duo Justice, Robert del Naja of Massive Attack, Elbow’s barstool poet frontman Guy Garvey and Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan.
Despite inside sources suggesting that mixing sessions in Melbourne had begun on new material, once again all information simply led to enigmatic misleads to what has become the most anticipated sophomore release in Australian music history.
In fact, the band have been teasing their sophomore album as early back at 2007, posting on their website that they had begun work on a new ’hip-hop inspired album’.
“It’s a really thrilling time for us right now as this record comes together, its so fuckin party you will die, much more hip hop than you might expect, and while there is still no accurate estimated time of arrival, were sure you’re gonna love it when it arrives,” read the statement.
“Much of last year was spent cutting up the spoken word/instructional records we need to tell the album’s musical story, and we have some 40 odd songs we’re narrowing down and finishing. So it’s real, it exists, and you know we wouldn’t be serving anything up unless it was gonna give you that same special feeling that since has. funnily enough its ended up sounding like the next logical step to since, we just had to go around in a big circle to get back to where we belong.”
As if you needed any proof of the group’s cultural currency, Since I Left You not only polled in year-end lists from tastemakers such as Pitchfork and Slant Magazine, but remains a beloved record to Australian audiences; charting in the top ten of both the industry ranked publication, The 100 Best Australian Albums and Triple J’s Hottest 100 Australian Albums Of All Time.
