The Avalanches' No Bad Memories Leads Friday's New Albums

The Avalanches release their fourth album, No Bad Memories, on Friday 16 October through Modular Recordings. It runs to 31 tracks and arrives with a long guest list, and it leads a Friday that also brings new albums from Eels, Richard Thompson, Two Shell and Sadurn, plus the return of Brian Eno’s Opal Records label with two long-unavailable records.

Here is what is arriving, what makes each release worth a first listen, and where to start.

The Avalanches: No Bad Memories

The Australian group built this album around a modern kind of nostalgia. According to Consequence’s report on the full tracklist, No Bad Memories was inspired by the way jingles, adverts, startup sounds and brand identities lodge themselves in our heads and stay there long after the products have gone. That idea shapes the record’s surreal corporate world, down to a trailer starring Haley Joel Osment.

The guest list is the headline. Across the 31 tracks, The Avalanches work with Jamie xx, Panda Bear, Karen O, Rivers Cuomo, Mike Patton, Barry Can’t Swim, Carly Simon, Haruomi Hosono, Ryoji Ikeda and Osment, along with Loaded Honey, Vegyn, John Glacier, Erick the Architect, Suzanne Ciani, Khadija Al Hanafi, Portraits of Tracy, Nikki Nair, Jessy Lanza and Prentiss.

Four songs are already out: “Can’t Get Over Losing You” with Portraits of Tracy, which arrived with the album announcement, “Every Single Weekend” with Jamie xx, “Together” with Nikki Nair, Jessy Lanza and Prentiss, and “Blue Shadows” with Karen O. Elsewhere, Rivers Cuomo appears with Vegyn and Baby Marlboro on “All The Time In The World”, Panda Bear guests on “Highfield”, Carly Simon turns up on “One More Fantasy” and Mike Patton appears on three songs. Osment voices two commercial-style interludes, “El Dorado TV Spot” and “Superfun!™ TV Spot”. The album closes on “The Pavements Light” with Haruomi Hosono, co-founder of Yellow Magic Orchestra.

Format matters on this one. The digital edition includes four tracks that are not on the physical versions, including “He Lives In The Old World” and a Loaded Honey version of “Final Credits”, while the vinyl, CD and cassette editions carry their own exclusive, “Evergreen Altar” with Vegyn.

Eels: COOKIE HAPPENED

Eels release their 16th album, COOKIE HAPPENED, on 16 October through E Works and Play It Again Sam. It follows 2024’s EELS TIME!, and The Line of Best Fit’s announcement report describes a record in which E, the band’s singer Mark Oliver Everett, reflects on victories, disappointments and the nature of a life lived, balanced with humour and optimism.

The title comes from an unlikely philosopher. E took it from a line attributed to Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster, about smiling because the cookie happened rather than crying because it is finished, and uses it as the album’s way of saying that even forgotten moments were worth having. The lead single, “Cap In Hand”, is told from the point of view of someone facing up to their mistakes and trying to make amends. The 12-track album opens with “CLOBBERED” and closes on “THE WAY I WAS MADE”.

Richard Thompson: Hippies, Thugs and Heroes

Richard Thompson releases his 20th studio album, Hippies, Thugs and Heroes, on 16 October through New West Records. As Americana UK reported, the 12 songs were produced by Thompson and James Frazee and recorded at Hobosound Studio in Weehawken, New Jersey, close to Thompson’s home.

The making of it is the interesting part. Thompson wrote and demoed the songs at home in more detail than usual, even buying a drum kit, so the band started from fuller demos. The players, Taras Prodaniuk on bass, Michael Jerome on drums, David Mansfield on guitar and fiddle, and Zara Phillips on backing vocals, then recorded live with very few takes, sometimes just two and rarely more than four. The album follows 2024’s Ship to Shore, opens with “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and closes on “Siren”, with “Cocaine Walking, Booze Talking” in between.

Two Shell: Infinite Now

The electronic duo Two Shell release Infinite Now on 16 October through Young. It follows their 2024 self-titled debut, and The Line of Best Fit’s report describes it as experimental pop that leans into a sense of positive escapism: songs meant to help listeners let go in dark times, mixing pop with underground electronic textures.

The album grew out of the single “The Nightmare”, which opens the record, and includes “Thing About You”, a track that first appeared in the duo’s Dekmantel set last summer. A trailer made with the surrealist visual artist Weirdcore, known for work with Aphex Twin, M.I.A. and Radiohead, introduces the album’s world. The 10 tracks close on “Clouds”.

Sadurn: The Underworld

Philadelphia’s Sadurn release their second album, The Underworld, on 16 October through Run For Cover Records. It follows the 2022 debut Radiator and widens the band’s mix of alt-country, bedroom pop and indie rock, according to The Line of Best Fit’s announcement.

Sadurn began as a solo project for the songwriter G DeGroot before guitarist Jon Cox, drummer Amelia Swain and bassist Tabitha Ahnert joined. The album came together across several sessions after a busy touring schedule, through DeGroot’s vocal problems and a break-up, and was finished in Philadelphia and mixed by Mark Watters at The Headroom. DeGroot has described it as a record born of grief and inner conflict, and of learning to move through those things. The nine songs open with “the weight” and close on “only angels”, with lead single “whole thing” near the end.

Brian Eno: Two Lost Albums Return on Opal

Brian Eno is relaunching Opal Records after more than three decades, and the label returns on 16 October with reissues of Another Day On Earth from 2005 and Drawn From Life, Eno’s 2001 collaboration with the German composer J. Peter Schwalm. Both albums have been unavailable outside Japan for almost two decades, Resident Advisor reported.

Another Day On Earth marked Eno’s return to song-based music after more than a decade focused on ambient work and production, and the reissue adds “The Demon of the Mines”, previously released only in Japan. Drawn From Life is credited to Eno and Schwalm together for the first time, features Laurie Anderson, Holger Czukay, Nell Catchpole and Leo Abrahams, and adds the previously unreleased “Bloom (Instrumental)”. Two unreleased live videos filmed in 2001, at Porto Festival and Fuji Rock, accompany the relaunch, and 1% of proceeds from Opal releases will go to Earth Percent.

From the MusicDrops.News Curator Team: “No Bad Memories is the one to clear an evening for: 31 tracks, a guest list that runs from Carly Simon to Mike Patton, and a concept built on the jingles we never chose to remember. For a quieter first listen, start with Sadurn’s The Underworld.”

Also Arriving on 16 October

It is a crowded Friday. The Line of Best Fit’s album release schedule also lists Florrie’s Magic For a While, Eivør’s Tungl, Holy Motors’ Heaven’s Night, Dummy’s do you love the color of the sky?, Flora Hibberd’s Mammoth, Gently Tender’s This Was Once Fields, June McDoom’s Follow The Light, Mali Obomsawin’s Automatic, Matt Carmichael’s Held in the Dark and TVOD’s The Farm for the same day.

For last month’s picks, see our earlier round-up of six new albums worth hearing, from Tinashe to Tom Morello. And if you only have time for one record this weekend, make it The Avalanches: an album about the sounds we cannot forget, made with a cast that spans generations.