The Avalanches - Wildflower

Sixteen years after Since I Left You rewired what a sample-based record could be, The Avalanches finally came back. Wildflower arrived in 2016 carrying the weight of one of the longest waits in modern music, and somehow it does not buckle. Robbie Chater and company built it the same impossible way as the first one, out of thousands of cleared fragments stitched into something that plays like a single continuous summer.

What is different this time is the cast. Where the debut was pure collage, Wildflower opens the door to guest vocalists and lets them wander through the psychedelia. Danny Brown and MF DOOM trade verses on the calypso-fueled "Frankie Sinatra," Camp Lo bring the vintage swagger to "Because I'm Me," Biz Markie turns "The Noisy Eater" into a cereal-crunching novelty masterpiece, and Jonathan Donahue of Mercury Rev drifts through "Colours" and "Kaleidoscopic Lovers." Toro y Moi, Danny Brown and the late David Berman all leave fingerprints on it.

Underneath the guests, the record still moves like a road trip: sun-bleached transitions, half-heard radio broadcasts, disco strings folding into garage rock folding into loping hip-hop. It is looser and warmer than its predecessor, less a museum piece than a scrapbook, and it rewards the kind of front-to-back listening vinyl was built for.

This is the double-LP pressing on XL Recordings and Modular, packaged with printed inner sleeves and a bonus CD of the full album. A sprawling, generous record that plays best across four sides.