THE AVALANCHES SHARE NEW TRACK ‘INTERSTELLAR LOVE’ FEATURING GRAMMY AWARD WINNING LEON BRIDGES
The Avalanches today share ‘Interstellar Love (feat. Leon Bridges)’ – the 7th track to be lifted from their forthcoming 3rd studio album ‘We Will Always Love You’ – set for release on December 11 and available for pre-order HERE now. Limited edition Grant Spanier x The Avalanches photo book now available on the band store HERE
Uplifting and energetic, the soaring soundwaves of ‘Interstellar Love’ feature the tender vocal of Leon Bridges and typically audacious sampling from The Alan Parsons Project’s iconic ‘Eye In The Sky’.
Robbie Chater says of the collaboration with Bridges : “Leon is an incredible singer, with just the most beautiful voice. He’s from Texas but we both happened to be in LA at the same time, which was lucky as he was on my all-time wish list. When we were in the studio, I told him the story about Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan and how her love-struck brain waves were sent out into space on the Voyager’s Golden Record. And this this song came out of that.
Mark Holland, head of A&R at EMI MUSIC says - " when I first heard the Alan Parsons sample in the original demo, all I could do was shake my head. This sample will be impossible to clear, the paperwork will be endless , and the cost prohibitive. But...I love the band and their message, I love Leon , and so.. we decided to try. In the end Alan Parsons Project were very good about it”
WATCH THE VIDEO FOR ‘INTERSTELLAR LOVE’ DIRECTED BY JONATHAN ZAWADA BELOW:
If there’s a single spark for We Will Always Love You it’s the story of the love affair between Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan: “science communicators” whose writings and TV programs brought the ever-deepening mysteries of astronomy and astrophysics to the mass audience. Chater was profoundly moved by the fact that the couple’s romance was captured and carried into space, thanks to the Voyager Interstellar Message Project. Druyan served as Creative Director in charge of curating the Golden Record: earthling music and assorted terrestrial sounds gathered for the contemplation of any alien civilisations that might be out there and be advanced enough to construct a playback system.
Originally, Druyan was set to be a presence on We Will Always Love You: a studio was booked to record her telling her own story. That never transpired, but Druyan “gave us permission to use her photo on the album cover,” says Chater. “We photographed it off a static-y television set and ran it through a spectograph to make the cover image. So that was a beautiful way that Ann could still be part of the record. We turned her into sound and back again”
Building on the sample-based approach of their classic albums Since I Left You and Wildflower, but stepping boldly into new terrain, We Will Always Love You is an exploration of the vibrational relationship between light, sound and spirit, We Will Always Love You doubles as “an exploration of the human voice” and a spiritual reckoning via the big questions “who are we really? What happens when we die?’”. So says Robbie Chater, who alongside bandmate Tony DiBlasi and collaborator Andrew Szekeres has moved beyond the party-up exuberance of The Avalanches’s youthful music to a tender, reflective sound infused with hard-earned life wisdom.
Sampling remains at the core of The Avalanches sound, but alongside all of the sample ghosts, We Will Always Love You features an array of living guests who contribute vocals and lyrics: Blood Orange, Rivers Cuomo, Pink Siifu, Jamie xx, CLYPSO, Denzel Curry, Tricky, Neneh Cherry, Sampa the Great, Sananda Maitreya and Vashti Bunyan and many more exciting collaborations to be revealed over the coming months. The Avalanches’s music has always dripped with melody, but because of this expanded role for guest singers and writers, We Will Always Love You is their most song-oriented album yet.
Delving into the background of the band; specifically their groundbreaking debut ‘Since I Left You’ - The Avalanches presented the world with a totally unique sound, crafted by meticulously combining over 3,500 vinyl samples. This approach set a precedent for dance music, inspiring a whole generation of musicians and producers. Released in Australia in 2000 and in the U.S. and the U.K. in 2001, Since I Left You is now regarded as a modern classic, It was named one of the year’s best albums by critics around the world and later placed in the Top 10 of Pitchfork’s Top 200 Albums of the 2000s and in the Top 20 of Rolling Stone’s Greatest EDM Albums of All Time. The video for the title track won Best Video at the 2001 MTV Europe Music Awards and was named as one of the top music videos of the 2000s by Pitchfork.
The release and subsequent touring in support of Since I Left You was followed by a 16-year radio silence, which was broken with the release of The Avalanches’ sophomore album, Wildflower (Modular Recordings). It debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Vinyl Albums chart and atop the Australian Albums chart in 2016. Wildflower earned six ARIA Award nominations and international acclaim, with The Guardian hailing it as "a joyous journey" and Pitchfork proclaiming it “better than just about any music ever made” and “an album that could have been made by nobody but the Avalanches.”
