Messed!Up
Few artists have made nostalgia sound quite as enormous as M83. The project of French musician Anthony Gonzalez began in Antibes in 2001, initially as a collaboration with Nicolas Fromageau, before Gonzalez gradually transformed it into his own sprawling universe of shoegaze guitars, analogue synths, electronic textures and cinematic emotion. Early records such as M83 and Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts established the blueprint: music that could sound simultaneously intimate and absolutely massive.
Then came Before the Dawn Heals Us in 2005, followed by Saturdays = Youth in 2008, as Gonzalez became increasingly fascinated with the sounds and imagery of adolescence, 1980s pop culture and the emotional excess of coming-of-age cinema. But it was 2011’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming that sent M83 into the stratosphere. The sprawling double album produced “Midnight City”, a neon-lit synth-pop anthem whose instantly recognisable saxophone riff turned M83 into an international phenomenon. The album earned a Grammy nomination and cemented Gonzalez’s reputation for making music that feels designed for the final scene of a movie that doesn’t actually exist.
Gonzalez subsequently refused to simply recreate that success. Junk (2016) embraced glossy 1970s and ’80s pop, while DSVII (2019) plunged into analogue electronics, vintage sci-fi and video-game atmospheres. He also created music for film and television, including his brother Yann Gonzalez’s Knife+Heart, before returning to the M83 name with 2023’s Fantasy. That record brought guitars and synths crashing back together, deliberately reconnecting with the expansive, shoegaze-heavy energy of M83’s earlier work.
Now, 25 years after M83 first appeared, Gonzalez is looking backwards again — but not simply for another trip down memory lane. I Wrote You a Letter, the project’s tenth album, was built from demos begun in 2024 and marks what Gonzalez describes as a return to instinct: less calculated, more spontaneous and closer to the freedom of M83’s earliest recordings. Across nine tracks, walls of guitars collide with shadowy electronics, ambient passages and fractured pop, reconnecting Gonzalez with collaborators including Benoît de Villeneuve.
I Wrote You a Letter arrived today, another chapter in M83’s long-running attempt to turn memory, dreams and adolescent wonder into something enormous enough to fill the sky.
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M83: ‘I Wrote You a Letter’
