Avalanche Party

Blitzing together their distinctive styles (Waterfield’s hard-hitting, bouncing-bomb drumming; Thorpe’s expressive avant-rock pyrotechnics; Joe Bell’s athletic basslines; Adkins’ intoxicating synth), Avalanche Party create a noise that blends and twists their individual influences into shapes that defy any neat label.

Newly signed to AMK, the alternative music imprint of Kartel Music Group, Avalanche Party’s second album Der Traum Über Alles is set for release in November 2024. If you were to sit the LP down on the psychoanalyst’s couch, its themes of bloodlust, subversion and incineration might suggest a heavy payload of pent-up aggression being detonated. The record’s first half in particular feels like a sonic exorcism: a 21st century occult primal scream that shifts from the frenzied New Wave of ‘Nureyev Said it Best’ and ‘Shake the Slack’ to the exhilarating war-drum deliverance of ‘Serious Dance Music’ and ‘Collateral Damage’. 

Der Traum Über Alles sledgehammers and it seduces: the elegant ‘Ecstasy’ has a tenderness that gradually veers into instability, as if Bell is committing himself to a lover at the end of days, while closer ‘Noise Between Us’ has all the fatalistic grandeur of Berlin-era Bowie as the band tempts us towards the void: ‘Into the edge, my love/Falling overboard.’