OK so this one made me actually put my phone down for a sec. The Avalanches are back. The Australian sample-wizards have announced their fourth studio album, No Bad Thing, and they're taking it on a national tour across Australia. If you know, you know. If you don't... pull up "Since I Left You" right now and thank me later, i'll wait.

wild to type this but the band is creeping up on three decades since they formed back in 1997. Three decades of music built almost entirely out of other music, chopped up and rearranged into something that shouldn't work and somehow always does. News.com.au broke the details, including the album title and the tour plans.

The title itself, No Bad Thing, feels very them. Their whole catalog has this warm, glass-half-full glow to it, even when they're stitching together something sad. I keep turning the phrase over in my head. It reads like a reassurance, like a note someone left on a fridge. On brand for a band whose most famous album basically sounds like a summers-long memory you can't quite place.

Four albums in nearly 30 years is a slow pace, but that's kind of the deal with The Avalanches. Their debut Since I Left You dropped in 2000 and broke everyone's brains with how much you could do with sampling. Then 16 years of silence before Wildflower in 2016, and We Will Always Love You in 2020. So a new one arriving now is actually quick by their standards. Blink and this is a prolific era for them.

No release date, full tracklist, or exact tour dates in what's been announced so far, so keep an eye out. The tour is being billed as national, and for a band like this that matters. Australian fans have watched plenty of international acts skip entire cities for years, so a proper run across the country is a big deal.

My grandma raised me on the idea that patience generally beats hype, and The Avalanches are basically the musical proof of that. No rush, no chasing whatever sound is charting, just long gaps and then an album that shows up when it's ready. I'd rather wait years for something that actually hits than get a rushed record every autumn.

If you've never gone deep on them, start with "Since I Left You" the song, then "Frontier Psychiatrist," then just play the whole debut front to back. It's one of those albums where the samples blur together until it feels like one continuous dream. Dante would tell you some three-hour movie does the same thing and I'd tell him no, this does it in 60 minutes.

The second details on No Bad Thing, a release date, or tour stops surface, I'll update. Until then the back catalog is right there and it still sounds like nothing else.