• News

• All

Mar 18, 2020 By Christopher Roberts Photography by Grant Spanier The Avalanches

Australia’s The Avalanches (Tony Di Blasi and Robbie Chater) have shared a new song, “Running Red Lights,” via a video for the track. The song features Pink Siifu and Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo. In song rapper Pink Siifu recites lyrics by the late David Berman from his Purple Mountains track “Darkness and Cold” (Berman had previously collaborated with The Avalanches). The Greg Brunkalla-directed video pays tribute to Berman and features dancer Erik Cavanaugh. Watch the video below.

The Avalanches’ Robbie Chater says had this to say about the song in a press release:

“‘Running Red Lights’ didn’t start out as a defining moment; ‘a single’ as it were. But Rivers responded to our fuzzed-out Spacemen 3 inspired jam with such open heartedness, that we soon dropped all pretense and got down to the heart of the matter… loss.

We love that wide eyed, elated, almost evangelical Los Angeles sense of possibility that he tapped into.

He captures that feeling that comes on the other side of the abyss, when you have lost everything and so then, there is nothing more to lose.

The way life is so beautiful and overwhelming and heartbreaking all at the same time. Rivers, like us, is always chasing the melancholy, that space…between the notes.

David had agreed to share his words with us for the middle 8 a few years back.

It’s a strange feeling releasing this now, 6 months after his passing, but we are so glad he got to hear the music, and it means a lot to us that he really liked it.

David wrote to me often through some dark, dark years and really pulled me through.

…Running Red Lights…is about such times.

Every moment is a gift. So live fearlessly. If you love someone, tell them.

Without connection…where are we?

As Rivers sings in the fade, ‘We are all we have…’

We have to have faith that that is enough.”

“Running Red Lights” follows “We Will Always Love You,” a new song The Avalanches shared in February that featured guest vocals from Blood Orange (aka Dev Hynes). The song title was revealed via Morse code flashed from the top of the Capitol Records building in Hollywood. “We Will Always Love You” was the first new single from the band since 2016’s Wildflower, which was the band’s long awaited follow-up to Since I Left You, The Avalanches’ acclaimed 2001 debut album (which was reissued in 2017). There’s no official word on a new Avalanches album.

Read our 2017 interview with The Avalanches on Wildflower.

Read our review of The Avalanches’ Wildflower.

Support Under the Radar on Patreon.