Avalanche Party have presented morsels from their upcoming album ‘Der Traum Uber Alles’ in recent months in the form of ‘John Coltrane’s Moscow Skyscraper’, ‘Nureyev Said It Best’ and ‘Collateral Damage’ and the latest “Shake The Slack” which have seen support from BBC Radio 1, BBC 6 Music, Radio X, DIY & more. Recorded at the hallowed Rancho De La Luna Studio in California’s Joshua Tree with Dave Catching, the LP retains a wild and animalistic essence. If you were to sit it 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’. 

Formed in 2016, Avalanche Party – Jordan Bell (vocals/guitar), Joe Bell (bass/vocals), Jared Thorpe (guitar/sax/vocals), Glen Adkins (keys) and Kane Waterfield (drums) – have stated “nobody comes from where we come from”. Hailing from different corners of North Yorkshire, the band was put together by the brothers Bell, who were brought up on a farm on the sprawling moors, home-schooled by their parents and initiated into the counterculture by their father Pete, who in the late 1960s was resident bassist at Beckenham Arts Lab, playing alongside Bowie among other South East London radicals.

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. Intended as a deviation from the ‘loud, thrashy’ live performances that first got them noticed, the band’s 2019 debut LP ‘24 Carat Diamond Trephine’ spurts forth a spectrum of styles, leaping from frenetic garage-psych to sedate surrealistic Americana to staccato uplifting indie rock over the course of its thirty-nine minutes. 

Forthcoming album ‘Der Traum Über Alles’, in contrast, is a more considered, full-formed beast, its dark underbelly undoubtedly a result of it being conceived during and after the caged-animal isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, on an industrial estate in Darlington and down in the basement studio they built in Middlesbrough once restrictions were eased. Decorated with Warholian tinfoil wallpaper, the studio served as a year-long nerve centre for the band while Thorpe and the brothers Bell pieced together their ideas, before a freak flood in September 2022 forced them to flee.

For all its urgency, the making of the LP required near-superhuman patience from the band. Recorded in November 2022 with Dave Catching (Queens of the Stone Age, Eagles of Death Metal) at Rancho de la Luna – his beautifully eccentric home studio on the edge of Joshua Tree National Park, California – Avalanche Party were set to be there two years before, but had to wait for the US border to reopen after repeated lockdowns Stateside. Swapping subterranean Teesside for this magical, hazardous desert landscape populated with rattlesnakes, scorpions and cholla cacti, the band recorded ‘Der Traum Über Alles’ in just ten days with Catching as their generous free-spirited pilot, his intimate knowledge of his vintage gear and Thanksgiving cooking sustaining the rapid-fire sessions. The idiosyncrasies of malfunctioning equipment (Jordan’s buzzing guitar, Jared’s deformed sax) were embraced as the band blazed through the songs, Catching’s laidback mastery of his own beaten-up equipment ensuring each track felt like a spontaneous eruption after so many months of suspended animation.

Catching’s generosity extended to introducing the band to Paul Frazer, who mixed the record. Having harnessed the intensity of such artists as IDLES, The Prodigy and Wilko Johnson, Frazer intuitively grasped how to magnify Avalanche Party’s energy on ‘Der Traum Über Alles’, creatively entertaining the most abstract of mixing suggestions – like Jordan’s notion that ‘Shake the Slack’ should burst forth like a lurking moray eel ambushing its prey. 

Like the hallucinated Rudolf Nureyev ‘dancing all night long through the streets’ in ‘Nureyev Said it Best’, Avalanche Party offer the best possible solution to the strains, strife and superficiality of our times: to set yourself free with unbridled, rampant creativity. Witnessing the band live is like being present at an electrified possession ritual and, with ‘Der Traum Über Alles’, they have produced a propulsive soundtrack to their darkest reveries; an incendiary alternative to the mundanity and meaninglessness of modern life and its mass-manufactured culture; a riotous call to arms, urging you to cling to your dreams above all else.

11.12.2024