You see, not many bands operate like this one - sometimes, they make skyscraping synth pop, but other times they dabble in glacial drones, and everywhere in between. “Kool Nuit” is an outlier track - not every song on Fantasy operates like it, but it’s worth highlighting because it showcases something that M83 have taken a long time to really nail. This sounds like it should be a jarring transition, but Gonzalez is no schmuck - the way this song blooms is shockingly graceful, especially if you relisten to the song immediately after it finishes, reminding you of how much of a fucking journey you’ve been on in just under eight minutes. Then, a glitchy, stuttering beat comes into frame, and from there, the song’s momentum shifts, and suddenly, it’s bordering on krautrock. Longtime collaborator Kaela’s voice joins in, gliding along the song’s surface as gracefully as always. There’s movement within this space, but it comes largely in the form of solemn synth notes - it’s a thoroughly ‘80s texture, from a guy who is all about ‘80s textures. As the album rounds into its final act, we reach “Kool Nuit.” For three minutes, we float gently in the kind of sonic bath of warm strings bleeding into dramatic dronescapes that Gonzalez has gotten freakishly good at drawing over the years. The key to understanding where Gonzalez is on Fantasy is easy to find. Seven years later, Fantasy seeks to reckon with the various flavors of M83 in the most naturalistic ways possible. How do you readjust your vision to account for that kind of growth? It’s enough to make your head spin. It’s no surprise, then, that Fantasy, the ninth M83 album, is the first “proper” (not counting the softer, more ambient/drone-focus DSVII) M83 album since 2016’s Junk. Before you know it, he’s ricocheting in the opposite direction, getting swept up in the afterglow of the success of the Tron: Legacy soundtrack and providing the soundtrack for Oblivion, the other movie that Tom Cruise made with recent Oscars snub victim Joseph Kosinski. Three years later, everything changed: the lead single from 2011’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, “Midnight City,” is a massive, inescapable, ever-present hit (it went platinum in multiple countries and, as of this writing, on Spotify alone, it has been streamed more than three-quarters of a billion times), to the degree where it remains a dominant force. It began turning heads, and people started to catch on to what he was making with M83. In 2008, M83 released Saturdays = Youth, which took his love of John Hughes movies and ‘80s synthpop and gave us a miraculous, Polaroid-sized, meticulously-crafted window into the feeling of a bygone era. For years, he (and, at the beginning, his friend Nicolas Fromageau) made epic, nostalgia-heavy synth music for discerning ears. The long road that stretches from the self-titled debut of M83 - Anthony Gonzalez’s now 22-year-old electronic project - and today is a truly bizarre one.
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