M83 - A Shoegaze Nebula

When Abbé Nicolas Louis de Lacaille, at the Cape of Good Hope on February 23, 1752, discovered the existence of Messier 83, or M83 for short, he certainly had no idea that this dynamic-looking spiral galaxy, shot through with bluish and reddish nebulous regions, would one day become a reference point for fields entirely removed from astronomy. Two and a half centuries later, two young Frenchmen, Nicolas Fromageau and Anthony Gonzalez, in the throes of a post-adolescent crisis of parties and drugs, hit on the idea of making music under that name. It was the dawn of 2000. Almost ten years on, a lot of water has passed under the bridge, for M83 of Antibes, France too.

At the time, shoegaze — already underrated even at the height of its finest expressions — had long since been consigned to the attic. Bands like Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine and Ride enjoyed only limited fame until, starting in the 2000s, several groups revived that kind of sound, updating it for the age of machines. Among the leading figures of that revival, alongside Ulrich Schnauss and Asobi Seksu, were certainly M83 too. Through a reworking of 4AD-style dream-pop and less abrasive shoegaze, Nicolas Fromageau and Anthony Gonzalez rightfully became founding fathers of so-called neo-shoegaze, draping their sweet astral trails in pop sensibility.

2001 saw the debut full-lengths of both the German Schnauss, with the gorgeous "Far Away Trains Passing By", and the French duo M83. Their self-titled album unfolds over more than an hour of music across fourteen tracks. What dominates is the sense of encountering something new. The sounds are analog; the era of effects-laden guitars is not erased but rather modernized through synth keyboards. M83, updating shoegaze for the laptop age, draw perfect sonic arcs that move in symmetrical, circular motion. Digital pulses always settle placidly over seamless stretches of notes. It almost sounds like music from the future, but it's really just the present moving forward.

Setting off spring-scented synths and setting themselves apart from their more celebrated countrymen (Air and Daft Punk above all), the self-titled album leaves full room for the imagination, through sonic melodies that take on alien shapes. Yet melody always remains the dominant force: "Night", caught between horizontally spread beats and sparkling psychedelic carpets of sound; the French-touch warmth of Air's "10.000 Hz Legend" in "Kelly"; the liturgy of "I'm Happy, She Said", with its tail first ambient then noise. What's striking is the ability to build melodies capable of lodging in the mind, limpid in their luminous clarity. References abound, of the most varied kind: from the warmest, most enveloping ambient ("Carresses", "At The Party" and "She Stands Up") to digital dancefloor atmospheres ("Sitting" or "Slowly") all the way to the enchanted music-box of "Violet Tree". Although the second half of the album perhaps loses a little of the bite that marked the first, the 2001 debut is certainly more than satisfying — a solid starting point.

After the successful tour following their debut album, the two Frenchmen decide to get back to work, bolstered by a deal with Mute, who evidently sensed their potential. Two years after their first effort, the eagerly awaited follow-up is ready, titled Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts. This second outing from M83 is probably the cornerstone of the entire shoegaze revival: by shortening the overall running time in favor of greater immediacy and less sprawl, and by leaning further into the dreamy side of their sound, the Antibes duo produce a genuine masterpiece. The intro ("Birds") is about as close as one can get to robotic Radiohead ("Sun is shining, birds are singing, flowers are growing, clouds are looming and I am flying"): a manifesto of the M83 aesthetic, a starting point for understanding the imagery behind the duo's vast soundscapes. The second track, "Unrecorded", is a melodic gem that moves through digital ups and downs not far removed from Telefon Tel Aviv, cut through by a vocoder and synth lines with an evident eighties flavor.
And while "Run Into Flowers" is a genuine pop gem, the perfect sonic backdrop for Sixpence None The Richer's "Kiss Me", the digital organ of "In Church" starts austere and dark, amid faint psych crackles, before gradually opening into a granular melody that floats ethereally in space. The digital slashes of "America" tear through the starry sky, before settling down and then suddenly surging back to life. The dreamy, measured pace of "On A White Lake, Near A Green Mountain" ideally transports the listener into a dense pastel-colored limbo. The magic seems unstoppable, the tracks follow one another with incredible ease, a long, timeless celestial journey, whether one lets oneself be enchanted by the tall waves that seem like friends ("Noise") or lulled by the dream-ambient digressions of "Gone". And before the final clangor à la Sigur Rós, the duo lead us straight onto the dance floor, immersing the listener in either modern synthetic textures ("0078H") or in the fabulous eighties ("Be Wild" and "Cyborg").
Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts stakes its claim in the pantheon of digital pop, without ever sounding cold. The plastic forged by M83 always remains fluid and molten, ready to ignite and be shaped into a thousand forms.

The success, needless to say, is overwhelming, so much so that the ensuing tour stretches on for nearly a year and a half. From an ultra-niche phenomenon, Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts catapults M83 into the spotlight of advertising, interviews, and acclaim from both specialist and mainstream press. But all the commotion following the 2003 masterpiece certainly did the duo no favors: once the grueling tour was over, Nicolas Fromageau decided to step aside, thus closing a brief but significant era for the French band, whose weight now falls entirely on the shoulders of Anthony Gonzalez, who from then on would enlist skilled musicians to help him both in live performances and in recording his subsequent work.

High expectations, fueled also by curiosity about the path taken after Nicolas's departure, thus surround the next album, Before The Dawn Heals Us, released in 2005, again on Mute. If the debut was marked by stronger ties to electronic music and the second album made melody its cornerstone, with Before The Dawn Heals Us a further facet emerges in the music of what can now be called a one-man band. No longer, or at least not only, tracks perfect for spacewalks: across the fifteen songs that make up the album, a more psychedelic, more introspective and darker side emerges. The desperate solemnity of the opening "Moon Child" is a telling manifesto of this: a woman's voice on the phone intones, anguished, "They say I made the moon everything was in the dark. No memories at all, just a tiny freezing wind in my back as i was sitting there singing a song they had never heard before suddenly, a voice told me keep on singing little boy and raise your arms in the big black sky raise your arms the highest you can".
The tones clash against one another, between clattering runs of energetic synths ("Don't Save Us From The Flames", "Teen Angst" and "A Guitar And An Heart"), psychedelic mantras ("Safe") and ambient digressions. And while "Farewell/Goodbye" recalls the sweetest episodes of dream-pop, "In The Cold I'm Standing" breathes a gothic air in the manner of the brighter side of Lycia.
Overall, though, this is a clear step backward. While there are several positive moments, the lingering impression is that Nicolas's departure and the unexpected success of the previous album certainly had an influence on the songwriting process — and not for the better.

Inspired by extensive listening to Brian Eno's early period, Anthony Gonzalez decided in 2007 to release the first volume of the Digital Shades series, temporarily setting aside the essence of the M83 sound. Digital Shades Vol. 1 gathers ten ambient sketches, running just over half an hour. Wrapped in a spirit close to certain new age works, this new M83 effort seems to confirm the downward slide already begun with the previous album.
Dominating the whole record is a sense of peaceful resignation, produced by sonic washes that never reach the heart but get lost in themselves ("My Own Strange Path", "Dancing Mountains"), often coming across as rather sterile ("Sister, part 1", "Sister, part 2"). The only bright spots come from the impetuous brightness of "Coloring The Void" and the similarly-toned closer "The Highest Journey".
All things considered, this is truly a misstep for Gonzalez, a disjointed production that reveals the exhaustion of a sound badly in need of renewal.

In 2008 Anthony Gonzalez returns, at least in intent, to the musical splendor of his earlier work, though exponentially amplifying its sweeter, more reassuring elements. While the first two albums shone with their own intense light, Saturdays=Youth reveals a creeping flattening into a none-too-convincing pop-shoegaze hybrid. The final result struggles to convince, hampered above all by a thoroughly disappointing second half.
The opening "You, Appearing" unfolds amid piano, a sweet ethereal voice and a myriad of spine-tingling reverbs. The pop shooting star that goes by the name "Kim & Jessie" shines, offering up an enveloping sound, perfect for a sunny drive. And while "Skin Of The Night" plays on vaguely gothic tones, the following "Graveyard Girl" winks — to put it mildly — at the Pet Shop Boys.
But from there on, aside from the kaleidoscopic worlds of "Coloeurs" and "Dark Moves Of Love", the quality drops off dramatically, moving from instantly gratifying tricks like "Too Late" and "Up!" to utterly cloying tracks, like the flat, tedious eleven minutes and eleven seconds of the closing track.
All things considered, this comes across simply as a not-entirely-successful work, an overly bloated record whose formula, as the minutes tick by, ends up turning saccharine.

The meteoric M83, after two delightful albums, seems to be slowly fading from view. The feeling is that a change of direction is needed to get back to crafting the gems the Antibes duo has shown it can deliver throughout its career.

The double album Hurry Up, We're Dreaming (2011) attempts to relaunch the French band's ambitions, drawing on its entire arsenal of choirs, synths and bombastic atmospheres. The formula is fairly standardized: slow build-ups followed by colourful final din ("Year One, One Ufo", "Ok Pal", "Raconte-Moi Une Histoire", "Intro", "My Tears Ha), thunderous openings with synths cranked to the max ("Midnight City", "New Map"), various interludes breaking up the pace, and a handful of slow ballads. Taken one by one, the tracks wouldn't even be that bad, but as a whole it's the kind of Monday-night stodge that's hard to swallow. Is this how the candy-coated revolution of that shoegaze revival, which had raised so many hopes, ran aground?

In 2013 Gonzalez took on soundtrack work. Oblivion (2013), another box-office hit for Joseph Kosinski, repeats the pairing of sci-fi and french-touch (much as Daft Punk's score for Tron Legacy had in 2010), but turns out to be more of a pompous hi-tech score by collaborator Joseph Trapanese (already involved in Hurry Up). More personal, both in execution and style, is You And The Night (2013), for the eponymous film by his brother Yann Gonzalez, closer to a kaleidoscope of varied techniques and shifting registers in perfect Vangelis style.

Meanwhile the departed Nicolas Fromageau launches his solo career under the name Team Ghost with We All Shine (2011) and Rituals (2013).

Now having taken off on an international scale, Gonzalez can add to his résumé an almost inevitable contribution to the choral Electronica 1 (2015) by his artistic godfather Jean-Michel Jarre.
On the following Junk (2016), Gonzalez directs his guests impeccably, also taking the time needed to give the package some sparkle. The content slips between crude techno and soft-dance, so what stands out is something that digs deeper into this brazenly commercial approach, one that by now no longer even concerns his own career: the slow-burning "For The Kids". Overwrought, redundant, with questionable arrangement choices (including some horrible electronic filters), and a genuinely mind-boggling length.

After the rather forgettable DSVII from 2019, built around sci-fi and fantasy film sonorities, in 2023 Anthony Gonzalez finally returns to deliver an extremely convincing work.
Fantasy is the title of this lengthy album (over a hundred minutes), on which M83 goes back to shaping multifaceted material, made up of ingredients such as dream-pop, shoegaze (finally), electronic music, cinematic touches, but also new wave, synth-pop, faint traces of post-rock and even post-punk. In short, a thoroughly inviting menu that doesn't remain just a long list of good intentions.
The opener "Water Deep" kicks things off in an unprecedented, almost disorienting way, between new-age excursions and cinematic touches, while the fine single "Oceans Niagara" is forged from dream-pop and shoegaze rhythms that recall the glory days of "Hurry Up" only to catapult them into the more contemporary dimensions of the Upside Down.
A new-wave guitar connects "Amnesia" to electronic weaves that are likewise decidedly eighties, showing all the mastery Gonzalez has always displayed in his use of synthesizers.
In the Vangelis-esque "Us And The Rest", sumptuous dreamlike, ancestral variables creep in, before the recognizable, almost liturgical crescendo dissolves into the wandering, minimal notes of the piano, recalling the excellent work Gonzalez did for the celebrated TV series "Versailles".
Among the standout movements are "Earth Of Sea", with its initial electronic pop that explodes into a pyrotechnic shoegaze finale, and the enchanted "Radar For Gone", led by the soft chords of acoustic guitar.

Fantasy is a simple title, perhaps even a slightly unoriginal one, but it sums up perfectly the great variety M83 has unleashed, after too many years of (rare) highs and lows that had somewhat lost touch with the work of Gonzalez and his trusted collaborators; a free-spirited record, one that sounds as though it needed to show a certain expressive independence to the artist himself before the final audience. A delightful return.

With the indie era of the 2010s now long gone, and the atmospheric rock experience of "Fantasy" (2023) also left behind, M83 – that is, de facto, Anthony Gonzalez – seems to have given up any interest in the charts and in making what, depending on the terminology currently in vogue, would once have been called music for "hipsters" or "indieheads". The fact is that twenty-five years have now passed, a quarter of a century since the French project's debut, and with I Wrote You A Letter (2026), Gonzalez seems to want to bring things full circle.
The new album indeed embraces a return to the project's origins, to the group's 2000s productions: atmospheric, psychedelic indie, dreamy and solemn, with heavy use of walls of sound bordering on shoegaze. The songs resonate with epic grandeur and refinement, and the goal seems to be to create soundscapes of powerful impact. Gonzalez has stated in an interview that the music on this record is indeed structured around: "Great adventures, feeling alive and forgetting about the world." A search for escapism that, given what's happening in this particularly "lively" 2026, is certainly understandable.
The album, with just nine tracks, rests on two components: dense, towering walls of sound and rarefied, melodic ambient stretches. Gonzalez constantly shifts from one to the other, working on impressions and emotions, discarding anything that might be "catchy" and putting even his longtime, most devoted fans to the test. You can hear it in "Opera", a composition in two parts, the first an engaging crescendo driven by synths and ethereal vocals, the second an ambient coda complete with a "clerical" organ section and angelic choirs to close it out. The ambition in the construction and arrangement is clear, so much so that at times it feels like listening to Jon Hopkins or Anders Trentemøller.
The journey continues on "Siren", amid glitchy moments and distorted sax, and "Behold… Beast" (also split into two parts of the same song), in a further ambient exploration built on a dialogue between sax and piano. "Aged" goes even further: after an intro that could be called a "bait", briefly bringing back the familiar indie-synth style most fans know – harking back to the golden days of Hurry Up, We're Dreaming (2011) – it instead settles into a neo-classical reinvention with pianistic digressions that caress a sweet, romantic central melody in the style of Claude Debussy. The fantasy of "Feeding Time", while still leaning on ambient passions, is the only track to fully revive M83's "indie" soul, the more hopeful and enthusiastic one, with a slice of pure indietronica that genuinely sounds out of time and, on this record, out of space too (in a good way).
I Wrote You A Letter is further proof of M83's extraordinary musical craftsmanship, but also of its determination never to stagnate in a comfort zone and to keep challenging itself, without ever taking its success or popularity for granted.

Contributions by Cristiano Orlando ("Fantasy") and Andrea Campana ("I Wrote You A Letter")

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