Saturdays = Youth
The \'80s weren\'t just about neon and power suits: the decade\'s synthesizers and pop music gave us previously unimagined ways to express our vulnerability. On his fifth album, French producer Anthony Gonzalez reinterprets those high-key tones while paying homage to stargazing silver-screen hitmakers like The Psychedelic Furs and Berlin. Full of gauzy synths and whispered vocals that call out to your inner teenager, it\'s nostalgic and ecstatic in equal measure.
After a pair of impossibly huge, overpowering records, M83's Anthony Gonzalez changes up his sound, ditching maximalism for beauty and drama. His new album is dense with 1980s new wave tropes and teenage memories, reflecting the soft-focused mythology of eternal summers and young love.
It's hard to imagine finding much to fault in an album that professes a serious devotion to the likes of the Thompson Twins and Kate Bush, but it's also hard to imagine taking such an album seriously. Credit M83, then, for gazing back at the '80s and escaping the revivalist void that traps so many different acts with…
Like fellow Frenchmen Air and Daft Punk, M83's Anthony Gonzalez has the knack for making sounds others might think of as outdated, or even tacky, into music that feels stylish and fresh.
This record’s focus on adolescence is somewhat ironic, because as an artistic statement it’s M83’s most mature yet.