The Avalanches - Since I Left You 2LP

Astralworks

Australian electronic act The Avalanches's genre-defying, critically acclaimed 2000 debutSince I Left You – originally released in Australia in 2000 and in the U.S. and the U.K. in 2001 – perfectly captured the hazy millennial zeitgeist. Band's members, Darren Seltmann and Robbie Chater, spent hours sampling music from vinyl records to create the songs on the album. Chater estimates that there are over 3,500 samples. After sampling and arranging, the pair would swap their tapes, listen to each other's ideas and expand on whatever they had heard. Pitchfork awarded it a 9.5/10 rating, noting, "Since I Left You sounds like nothing else...this is an album brimming with spontaneity, joy, sadness, humor, reflection, and general human-ness" while NME hailed the album as a "joyous, kaleidoscopic masterpiece of sun-kissed disco-pop." Since I Left You was named one of 2001's best albums by numerous critics – and its enduring influence was underscored when it placed in the top 10 of Pitchfork's Top 200 Albums of the 2000s.