The Avalanches: the jingle you kept, rebuilt as pop
Thirty tracks of ad jingles and invented products, with a stack of guests. It is a lot, and it mostly works.
BY JOLT Staff · OCT 16 2026 · 4 min readNo Bad Memories is the Avalanches with the television left on. Their fourth album runs thirty tracks and is cut from ad jingles, start-up chimes and audio logos you have not thought about since you were a kid. It is the funniest record they have made, and the funniest parts are the argument: the jingle was pop music all along, and you were never allowed to enjoy it.
The group formed in Melbourne in 1997 and built their name from other people's records, crates of half-forgotten vinyl cut into the debut Since I Left You in 2000. Sixteen years passed before Wildflower in 2016, four more before We Will Always Love You in 2020, and by then the samples had been joined by a long guest list, singers and players credited as themselves rather than as sources. Robbie Chater and Tony Di Blasi are still at the centre, with Andy Szekeres now a member. Those first three records went global, then interstellar. This one stays in the kitchen, with the ad break still running.
“That’s what we’re interested in exploring. What’s the difference between a beautiful pop song about a breakup and a piece of music for advertising that was written to sell a product? The intention’s different, but is it any less valuable, or any less great a piece of songwriting?”
It is out 16 October on Modular Recordings, and it was seeded in May with an ARG around Takumi Digital Archives, a fictional company promising to store your memories in the cloud. The website carried fake vintage magazines, fake adverts, and links to research on how advertising can plant memories of things that never happened. Five singles came first, from "Together" in May to "Far Away" in September, and behind them Australian tour dates for February and March 2027. Karen O and Rivers Cuomo return from the last album, and around them are Haruomi Hosono, Ryoji Ikeda, Suzanne Ciani, Panda Bear, Carly Simon, Jamie xx, John Glacier, Khadija Al Hanafi, Mike Patton and Haley Joel Osment, several of them present for a single line. A jingle sticks harder than most songs, and flipping the fragments is supposed to make joyous pop.
It is dance pop built from other records: nu-disco, footwork, drum and bass, chillwave, whichever one the track needs. Voices get spliced into hooks. "Bd-R" opens the album with 42 seconds of jingles for products that do not exist, around thirty of them stacked up and cut fast, and then "Together", with Nikki Nair, Jessy Lanza and Prentiss, goes manic, a glitch-pop song that keeps interrupting itself. "Every Single Weekend", with Jamie xx, is about living for the weekend and the money spent getting there, and it holds elation and dread inside two minutes. Its video follows a model auditioning for an advert for a drink called El Dorado, which tells the joke a second time.
"Blue Shadows" hands Karen O a slow ballad with a bruise in it, and it is the one place the record sits still. "All The Time In The World", with Rivers Cuomo, Vegyn and Baby Marlboro, is the biggest pop swing here, a chorus built for a stadium that exists only in the mix. "Far Away" pairs John Glacier with Khadija Al Hanafi over a drum and bass ballad written the year before, and its video was shot on a 2001 Sony Handycam during a road trip through Tokyo and Minakami. Al Hanafi recurs across the record, which is one of its better decisions.
The best tricks sit in the back half. "Magic Wand", with Barry Can't Swim, takes a 1970s proto-disco cut by Renee Acker and builds its chorus out of her ad libs from the original's fade-out, which is the whole album in one move: the leftover becomes the hook. "Our Love Is Alive", with Suzanne Ciani and Barry Can't Swim again, sets bursts of euphoric affirmation against Ciani's music lessons from Sesame Street. "Under Yr Power" is the rare groove floor filler. "Total Recall", with Mike Patton, is the comedown, a synth piece gone soft at the edges. "The Pavements Light" gives Haruomi Hosono a jazz club under the lights of a science fiction film.
If you have ever caught yourself humming a jingle for a bank, this record is aimed at you. It suits a kitchen, a car, a walk with one earbud in. Anyone who played We Will Always Love You without reaching for the skip button will take all thirty tracks whole. If you want an album that behaves like an album, this is a lot of advertising to sit through, and the Avalanches know that too.
The flaw is the form. Eleven of the thirty tracks run under a minute, and by "Suv Heaven", twenty-eight seconds of car advert, the joke has been made twice. The fragments are the point, but the cost is that you never get to live inside a groove: "Magic Wand" is over in 2:26, and "Every Single Weekend" stops just as it is going.
A four, then, and here is the case. Nobody else is cutting pop out of the ad break with this much care, and the fragments are chosen by someone who owns the records and knows which four seconds matter. The last track is called "Final Credits". You will be humming it before you clock where it came from.
