“Frankie Sinatra” by The Avalanches

"Frankie Sinatra" broke a long silence: the lead single from Wildflower, the Avalanches' second album, it arrived on 2 June 2016 as the Australian group's first new music in 16 years. It's also one of the oldest things on that record, built around "Bobby Sox Idol," a calypso side by Wilmoth Houdini that Robbie Chater used to spin at a Melbourne club called Brains. He and Tony Di Blasi found it grating and oddly repetitive at first, until it won them over.

Chater produced it, with extra production from Di Blasi, and mixed it with Tony Espie. Danny Brown and MF Doom trade rap verses over the loop, and the writing credits reach all the way back to Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. The plan, the group told Zane Lowe, was a looser, rowdier record made of samples that still sounded like them, and this is that plan at its most gleefully unhinged.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.