Avalanche Party: Garage Punk Straight Off the North Yorkshire Moors
Photo: Paul Hudson / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/). Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SXSW_2019_-_Avalanche_Party_(40412790913).jpg
Ask Avalanche Party to describe themselves in three words and, Clash reports, they've been known to say "Yorkshire, garage-punk, rock 'n' roll." That's a fair summary of the band, whose track "Solid Gold" is on U-Rock®'s WURN-dB Underground playlist.
Brothers from the moors
According to Clash, brothers Joe Bell (bass) and Jordan Bell (guitar, vocals) built the band from musicians in their area. Jared Thorpe (guitar, saxophone, vocals), Kane Waterfield (drums) and Glen Adkins (synths) complete the line-up. Clash and the music blog The Bucket Playlist both give 2016 as the year it formed. A 2015 NARC. magazine interview, though, was already calling Avalanche Party a band 18 months old, with a debut EP on the way. So the band's roots go back further than its official start date.
The setting explains a lot. The Bucket Playlist says the Bell brothers grew up on a farm on the moors and were home-schooled. Their father, Pete, was resident bassist at the Beckenham Arts Lab in London in the late 1960s, where he played alongside Bowie among others. Jordan told the site there were always instruments set up in the house, because bands came round to rehearse: "We picked them up naturally, because it looked fun – and it was!" His first gig, he said, was at 11, at a festival in Pickering.
Joe Bell told Soundsphere that the moors shaped them. "When you grow up in a place with no school, no TV, no shops and no streets you're forced to make stuff happen." In 2015 he told NARC. that most of the band shared a house in Castleton, "right bang in the middle of the moors." Their local scene was Middlesbrough, so they tended to be classed as a Teesside band, "but we're a band from the middle of nowhere!"
The sound
NARC.'s Linsey Teggert set the scene in 2015: imagine Arctic Monkeys around AM, "gone feral," "rolling around in the dirt, foaming at the mouth." Her verdict was that "Avalanche Party mean business." Back then the band was a four-piece. It had formed from the ashes of The Chapman Family, which guitarist Owen Corrigan came from, and 3 Foot Ninja, the earlier band of Jordan, Joe and Kane.
Albums, a flood and Joshua Tree
Clash says the debut album, 24 Carat Diamond Trephine, came out at the end of 2019. Then the pandemic stalled everything, and the band built their own studio in a basement in Middlesbrough. They were ready to fly to the US to make album two with producer Dave Catching at his Rancho De La Luna studio in Joshua Tree when the Middlesbrough studio flooded. "That was pretty good timing, really," Jordan told Clash. Just before it happened, they had toured Europe with …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead.
The sessions in Joshua Tree did happen. In a 2024 interview with Secret Eclectic, Jordan called working with Catching "a true dream, a wakeful bliss." He described Catching as "the master facilitator" and an endlessly generous host, someone who cooked the band a Thanksgiving turkey and drove them out into the national park.
Why it matters on U-Rock®
Avalanche Party are exactly the kind of band U-Rock® was built for. They came from the middle of nowhere, built their own studio and played their way around Europe. "Solid Gold" is waiting on the WURN-dB Underground playlist.
U-Rock® play data: no plays logged in the BROADCAST or CORE histories (2026-07-02 to 2026-10-12). The band appears on the WURN-dB Underground Spotify playlist.
Sources
- Clash, "Next Wave #1208: Avalanche Party" — https://www.clashmusic.com/next-wave/next-wave-1208-avalanche-party/
- The Bucket Playlist, Avalanche Party interview ("The Noise Between Us") — https://inthebucketplaylist.com/avalanche-party-with-the-noise-between-us-we-liked-it-straight-away-it-had-a-very-different-feeling-to-anything-else-that-we-had-on-the-album/
- Soundsphere, "Band Spotlight: Avalanche Party" — https://www.soundspheremag.com/spotlight/band/band-spotlight-avalanche-party/
- NARC., "Local Interview: Avalanche Party" (Linsey Teggert, 27 May 2015) — https://narcmagazine.com/local-interview-avalanche-party/
- Secret Eclectic, "'Yorkshire, garage-punk, rock-n-roll' | Interview with Avalanche Party" (24 Jul 2024) — https://secreteclectic.com/2024/07/24/yorkshire-garage-punk-rock-n-roll-interview-with-avalanche-party/
- Spotify, "WURN-dB Underground" playlist (embed) — https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/0bZ0fCQCL7IkKfqcQycsMI
