It’s been way, way too long between drinks for Melbourne group the Avalanches. The last time they had an album out, Franz Ferdinand were still trying their luck as the Karelia and the young ‘ns known as Arctic Monkeys were…well, even younger. Locally, bands like Wolfmother, Jet, and the Vines didn’t exist as far as the greater populace was concerned, and rock had been declared ‘dead’. Again!

Now, after what must have at one stage seemed like countless years of non-stop touring, the group are back in Melbourne – they’re drinking too much coffee, and taking steps towards working on tracks for future Avalanches recordings. “We’ve got to start working on it sooner or later, so it might as well be now!” Tony offers voluntarily by way of information as to where the band are headed. “We feel like we’ve turned a corner and now really know what we’re doing and what direction we want to be heading in and everything.”

He doesn’t mind talking about the album, but it’s very much in the infancy stages still – despite the group having been working on it for close to three years. “We went in so many different directions and really tried to do something different to Since I Left You,” he explains, “and really try and find something new and innovative. I guess if it was easy then everybody would be doing it.”

The Avalanches may be a revolving circus, but at the moment the core of the band is Tony, Robbie, and Darren. It’s almost back to the old days – all they need is Gordie and all of a sudden it WILL be back to the El Producto EP days. So can we prepare for them to crack out the golden oldies like “Rock City” at the forthcoming St Jeromes Laneway Festival? “Those days are just a complete blur to me. It was all so crazy,” he says with a laugh.

Whilst it doesn’t feel that long ago that the band started, Tony is aware that it’s been a decade. “It feels like everything’s gone really, really quickly. From Since I Left You, which came out November 2000 [in Australia], it really doesn’t feel like that. It feels like we did that, we toured, we started trying to make a record again, and I don’t know – it just doesn’t feel that long ago.”

It’s still fresh, exciting. It’s a good thing – part of the appeal of the Avalanches was always how they managed to balance chaos and clarity, and at this stage Tony says that the band have something interesting planned for their ‘comeback’ performance at the Laneway Festival. It may, or may not, involve circus performers.

“We’re still tossing up what we’re going to do because we’ve had this crazy circus-esque DJ show going for a while now and I just don’t know if we want to keep doing that,” he explains. “At the moment we’re kind of looking into doing something maybe different, but if we can’t think of anything then we’ll probably resort back to that again.”

While he says that the band aren’t interested in heading back in the direction of organic instruments as they did at the beginning of their career, they still have many little ideas running around in their collective heads that people will just have to wait and see. “At the moment we’re not even sure about it, so we’ll just have to wait! I just feel like we can’t do anything performance-wise where we’re not jumping off speakers and hurting ourselves.”

Ah, yes, the legacy of the Avalanches live shows – two broken legs, multiple sore heads, pools of blood, and a plethora of differently hued bruises. “Actually one of them was my fault,” he says of the two broken legs. It was in Brisbane when Darren fell on the ground and Tony thought it would be a good idea if he jumped on him with his shoulder – and here he starts laughing as he tells the tale, the macabre bastard – and cracked his leg. But he didn’t mind. That much.

“It feels like this crazy beast is just released within us,” is the way Tony explaims the mayhem of the Avalanches live experience. “Get us up there and from the first shows we did it wasn’t planned but there seemed to be this really spontaneous energy that resulted in this crazy energy, and it’s just heaps of fun. I think that’s the main thing; we’re having so much fun and it really comes across that way.”

As the line-up has changed you’d think it’s necessitated an adjustment to the band’s sound, but Tony doesn’t actually think that’s been the case. “With the line-ups it’s been a bit of a surprise, but in terms of the music we’re all about progressing and doing something different. There’s kind of this feeling with this band that we don’t like to stay in one place for too long, and start something new.”

It’s funny that there’s mayhem with live show, and then the sound of the recordings is nothing short of meticulous. When the band prepped for their initial tour post Since I Left You they spent three months in the studio working on it. “It felt like we wrote a completely different album for the live show and transformed Since… into our live energy. It really worked.”

And now it’s a DJ show…albeit one with circus freaks. “That can be real mayhem too. We had this absolutely awesome show at Meredith, and everything seemed to work really well. Sometimes it seems that you can get too many people on stage and the turntables are bouncing around and people are bumping into everything and you’re trying to mix and someone’s yelling at you through a megaphone but it’s kinda good! I think when people are there to have a good time then that’s it I guess, and it’s all about the energy and trying to bring that across to the crowd I guess. Sometimes the next day I wake up and think ‘that was so out of control and crazy’ but the crowd reaction is really good.”

This show will be the last the Avalanches do for a while until they complete the follow-up to their awesome debut. Is it hard to go into hibernation like this considering how much fun they have live? While the band do have the Brains club nights that they put on, seemingly at random, in Melbourne, it’s not quite the same.

“We started off with a certain kind of sound when we started off Brains, this African sound of drums and the such, but now we’re getting into all this different kind of stuff. It’s amazing to go through and really want to hear new things.”

The Avalanches exclusively play the St Jeromes Laneway Festival in Melbourne and Sydney. Dates:
Sunday 26 February – Caledonian Lane, Melbourne
Sunday 5 March – Circular Quay, Sydney