The Avalanches End Their Long Silence With the Bright, Restless Single “Together”

The Avalanches have finally broken a nearly six-year stretch without new music, returning with “Together,” a new single released via Modular Recordings and featuring Nikki Nair, Jessy Lanza and Prentiss. It is the Australian electronic group’s first fresh release since 2020, and it arrives with a noticeably different kind of energy from the band’s more nostalgic material.

Where listeners might expect the sample-happy drift of early Avalanches lore, “Together” pushes in the opposite direction. It is built to move forward, not backward. The track leans into the dancefloor rather than memory, with a bounce that signals a band more interested in momentum than in revisiting the textures that made them famous in the first place.

The Avalanches
Dean Podmore

The current lineup, now made up of Robbie Chater, Tony Di Blasi and Andy Szekeres, still stands in the shadow of Since I Left You, the 2000 debut that changed the rules around sample-based production. Its appeal came from the painstaking way it folded hundreds of fragments from artists as varied as Françoise Hardy, Sérgio Mendes, Raekwon, Wayne and Shuster, and Madonna into one fluid body of music. The title track and “Frontier Psychiatrist” turned that method into something both instantly recognizable and strangely timeless, with the band’s reps later describing it as “a global footprint for collaborative sampology in the 21st century.”

The waiting game that followed was part of The Avalanches’ story almost from the start. When Wildflower finally arrived 16 years later, it went straight to No. 1 on the ARIA Albums Chart. Then We Will Always Love You came in 2020 and moved on a more compressed timeline, eventually winning the Australian Music Prize for best album of the year. The group briefly reappeared in 2024 with “All You Children,” a collaboration with Jamie xx from In Waves, but “Together” feels more like the beginning of a new phase than a one-off detour.

The band is framing this return through a “Superfun” campaign that includes an image of Chater gaming, plus an official animated video for “Together” that takes the idea of obsolete tech and gives it a strange, cheerful afterlife. In the clip, an iPod and a diskette grow arms and legs and head out into their day, while a Nokia 3310 descends from above with angel wings. The tone is playful, but there’s a sharper concept underneath it all, hinted at by the line in the band’s statement: “How are you looking after your memories? At Takumi digital archives your most treasured moments are safe with us,” followed by an invitation to “visit Takumi today” at takumiarchives.com.

Jonathan Zawada directed and animated the video, which is available to stream below.