The Australian electronic group return with their first new music since 2020, a shimmering, nostalgia-drenched single that signals a fourth album may be on the way.
The Avalanches are back. Five years on from We Will Always Love You, the Australian electronic group have shared ‘Together’, a new single featuring an eclectic cast of collaborators: breakbeat-and-electro producer Nikki Nair, Canadian dance-pop artist Jessy Lanza, and Mississippi-born viral sensation Prentiss.
The track is a collage of samples, fizzy dance sounds and twisted vocals that add up to something that sounds like the Avalanches in their established tone but sideways with a more modern production energy.
A pitched up Jessy Lanza sings: “You only know the picture me, the one that smiles with hope / You could never picture me at home, crying over my telephone / I’ll never be the picture me, the me I love the most / Staring at a picture on my phone, staring at a memory that’s gone.”
The video, directed and animated by Jonathan Zawada, keeps things playful with a floppy disk and an iPod galloping forward in front of a sun that rises and sets with frequent regularity.
The press release links to Takumi Digital Archives.
How are you looking after your memories?
At Takumi digital archives your most treasured moments are safe with us.
Visit Takumi today here.
The Avalanches have been teasing the follow-up to We Will Always Love You of late. Anticipation ramped up when the group launched a new logo and rolled out a retro-futuristic role-playing game tied to a fictional company called Takumi.
The Takumi Archives website asks visitors a series of strange questions before displaying the message: “At Takumi, we understand that digital archives are more than data repositories – they are institutional memory, intellectual property, and cultural heritage.”
For We Will Always Love You billboards directed fans to a cryptic website with Morse code that gave clues to the release so they have form in this kind of thing.
The three features are varying in their collaboration:
Nikki Nair has distinguished himself as a bold voice in hybridised dance music, with releases traversing genres and fusing electro, leftfield techno, breaks and UK bass. He also committed to a very wry matter-of-fact tone on Instagram.
Jessy Lanza, meanwhile, has been a fixture of the Hyperdub and Lanza’s own hypnotic brand of R&B-adjacent electronic pop since her 2013 debut Pull My Hair Back.
Prentiss is a Mississippi-born teenage artist who broke through with the viral single ‘October’, attracting co-signs from Justin Bieber, Mark Hoppus, and others, before signing with Cinematic Music Group – an unusual fit perhaps, but one that speaks to the Avalanches’ magpie instincts.
Last year, the Avalanches contributed tracks to Massive Attack’s ‘Piccadilly Un:Plugged’ installation in London, and in 2024, they collaborated with Jamie xx for ‘All You Children’ on his In Waves album.
Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005. He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Cara Magazine, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, co-founder of Lumo Club, event curator, Indie Sleaze club promoter, and producer of gigs and monthly listening parties & events in Dublin.
