fantasy tour m83

New album ‘Fantasy’ out now

M83 announces the details of his new full-length album, FANTASY .   In addition to this news, M83 has shared the sweeping, transformative first cut “Oceans Niagara” . Accompanying the track is a video directed by his long-time creative collaborator, filmmaker ( Knife + Heart , You And The Night ) and brother Yann Gonzalez.

“BEYOND ADVENTURE”, Gonzalez sings into a trademark M83 swirl of synths & guitars. These are the only two words in the entirety of “Oceans Niagara”, a proclamation with an ellipsis, and the most apt tone-setting for the evocative, sense-amplifying journey that is Fantasy. 

For Gonzalez, Fantasy ‘s direction and aesthetic was immediately clear. “I wanted this record to be very impactful live,” he says. “The idea was to come back with something closer to the energy of Before The Dawn Heals Us. The combination of guitars and synths is always in my music, but it’s maybe more present on this new record than on the previous ones.”

Reserved in nature, Gonzalez also sought to continue a trend that has become more prominent in his recent albums. “I wanted to be more present lyrically and vocally even if that was daunting at first,” he states . “I thought if I could achieve that, this album will be more personal than those that came before.”

Fantasy, M83’s 9th studio album , proves a towering sensory delight and marks his most personal album to date, an alternate world that Gonzalez has created as an escape from the disconnected world we live in today. 

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M83 has also announced news of an extensive summer tour. Full dates are listed below.

• Consequence

M83 Announces New Album Fantasy, North American Tour Dates

First single "Oceans Niagara" is out now

Anthony Gonzalez has readied his ninth album as M83 .  Fantasy  arrives March 17th via Mute, and M83 will take the record on the road with a North American tour that begins in April. What’s more, first single “Oceans Niagara” is out now.

“I wanted this record to be very impactful live,” M83 said of Fantasy. “The idea was to come back with something closer to the energy of [2005’s] Before the Dawn Heals Us . The combination of guitars and synths is always in my music, but it’s maybe more present on this new record than on the previous ones.”

That emphasis on guitar is sure to make M83’s upcoming tour especially interesting. The North American trek begins April 10th in Phoenix, Arizona and wraps up May 16th in San Fransisco. After that, Gonzalez will head to Europe for a handful of summer dates. See his full tour itinerary below, and grab tickets via Ticketmaster beginning Friday, January 13th at 10:00 a.m. local time.

Buzzing synths and swirling guitar combine into a triumphant melody in “Oceans Niagara,” a song Gonzalez said was meant to create “this sense of friendship. Listening to that song, I imagine people running, driving fast, or riding spaceships together. It’s this sense of going forward, like a magic potion that you take to discover new worlds. Beyond Adventure!”

Pre-orders for Fantasy are ongoing. Watch the video for “Oceans Niagara” below, and scroll onward to see the album’s artwork and tracklist .  The record follows M83’s 2019 album  DSVII ,  and marks Gonzalez’s first release since celebrating the 10th anniversary of his seminal album  Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming   back in 2021.

Fantasy  Artwork:

M83 2023 Tour Dates: 04/10 — Phoenix, AZ @ The Van Buren 04/11 — Albuquerque, NM @ El Rey Theater 04/13 — San Antonio, TX @ The Aztec Theater 04/14 — Austin, TX @ Stubbs 04/15 — Houston, TX @ The Lawn White Oak Music Hall 04/16 — Dallas, TX @ House Of Blues 04/18 — Nashville, TN @ Marathon Music Works 04/19 — Atlanta, GA @ The Eastern 04/21 — Philadelphia, PA @ Franklin Music Hall 04/22 — Washington, DC @ The Anthem 04/23 — Boston, MA @ Roadrunner 04/25 — New York, NY @ Terminal 5 04/28 — Montreal, QC @ MTELUS 04/29 — Toronto, ON @ HISTORY 04/30 — Royal Oak, MI @ Royal Oak Music Theatre 05/02 — Chicago, IL @ Riviera Theatre 05/03 — St. Paul, MN @ Palace Theatre 05/05 — Denver, CO @ Mission Ballroom 05/06 — Salt Lake City, UT @ Ogden Amphitheater 05/08 — Portland, OR @ Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall 05/09 — Vancouver, BC @ Commodore Ballroom 05/10 — Seattle, WA @ Showbox SoDo 05/14 — Pasa Robles, CA @ Vina Robles Amphitheatre 05/16 — San Francisco, CA @ Fox Theater

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M83 Baptizes New Record ‘Fantasy’ in an Ocean of Sound: Concert Review

By William Earl

William Earl

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“Beyond adventure!” shouted M83 mastermind Anthony Gonzalez and keyboard player Kaela Sinclair, minutes into their first of two NYC shows at Terminal 5 on April 25. This mission statement is repeated several times in the debut single “Oceans Niagara” from their recently released ninth studio album, “ Fantasy .” The sprawling record is the backbone of this tour, with the band running through 10 of the tracks during the evening, including a five-song stretch at the beginning as bold in tone and attack as anything in their deep catalogue.

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20 Questions With M83: ‘Emails, Socials, My Phone, They Are My Worst Enemies — My Imagination Saves Me From Turning Insane’

Anthony Gonzalez and crew kicked off the final leg of the Fantasy tour last night (Oct. 3) in Washington, with shows extending through mid-October.

By Katie Bain

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Amidst praise for the new album — 13 tracks of transportive, deep, pretty and emotionally evocative music — Gonzalez has also gotten attention for the monster mask he’s wearing on the cover art and in all the promotional materials, a slightly scary but now seasonally appropriate guise he says is “a way of hiding myself from the world.”

He did, however, hit a wave of unwanted attention after a March interview in which he said that “EDM is probably one of the styles of music that I hate the most,” expressing disdain that his era-defining hit “Midnight City” is so often played by “these bro EDM DJs.” Gonzalez later clarified, releasing a statement that “I do not hate the EDM community. No! I am forever grateful for the love and support,” but adding that he does hate “DJs using my music without any permission.”

Here, Gonzalez shares if any DJs have asked for this permission, why he’s more comfortable in the monster mask and why he doesn’t believe in guilty pleasure music.

1. Where are you in the world right now, and what’s the setting like?

Just arrived in Seattle to start the last leg of the Fantasy tour. I always loved this city. It feels like Seattle has a soul and spirit that is highly inspiring.

2. What is the first album or piece of music you bought for yourself, and what was the medium?

3. What did your parents do for a living when you were a kid, and what do or did they think of what you do for a living now?

My mum was the owner of a very cute little fabric store in the heart of Antibes old town, while my dad was a police inspector. Neither of them had anything to do with music, though my mother always pushed my brother and I to play a musical instrument. I feel extremely lucky that my parents always supported us in our choice of being a musician and a movie director. We always had the freedom to do what we liked. 

4. What’s the first non-gear thing you bought for yourself when you started making money as an artist?

I actually don’t remember buying anything but musical instruments when I started to earn money with my music. It has always been my sole obsession.

5. If you had to recommend one album for someone looking to get into electronic music, what would you give them?

I think it would be a Tangerine Dream album called Phaedra . It’s a dark but rewarding album that takes you on a journey to very strange places. One of my very first shocks as a teenager listening to electronic music.

6. What’s the last song you listened to?

“ Pygmy Love Song ” by Francis Bebey. 

7. You’ve been on the road behind Fantasy since April. Has there been anything surprising or particularly interesting to you about the way the album has come to life in the live setting?

To me, it’s the team I’ve put together for the tour that keeps me wanting to play more. I love my band and crew. They always have my back and they keep inspiring me every night on stage. I don’t think I could have done it without them.

Simply because it’s a track that never came out digitally and we close our shows with that song. The response of the audience has been great so far, and it’s an unknown song that deserves to be properly released in my opinion.

9. The creature that’s on the cover of Fantasy and in a lot of your promotional materials for it — what is that creature? What motivates it? Why does it represent this album?

It’s a way of hiding myself from the world. I absolutely hate seeing me. It’s starting to scare me to know that so many photos and videos of me are online. Ideally I would like to be able to have control over such images, but it’s just practically impossible. So I choose to protect myself and just fight to make sure that my music stays the main protagonist in what I do. 

10. You wrote on social media that “I want to keep having fantasies about worlds that I don’t know and creatures I don’t understand, and that’s the story behind this record.” Unpack that a bit more for us — have you kept having those fantasies? Why is this important to you?

I’m just a dreamer, and anything related to being an adult in a modern world is boring and terrifying to me. The ultra-connected aspect of our society is making life more stressful. Emails, socials, my phone, they are all my worst enemies. My imagination saves me from turning insane with it all. Music helps a lot.

11. Based on things you’ve said in previous interviews, it sounds like you’re ready to move away from Los Angeles. What did the city give you while you were there? Why is it time to leave?

But I miss France a lot, my family and friends, my culture and my roots. I’m lucky that I can share my time between California and France, even though traveling has become more and more difficult. A lot has changed in 15 years, and not in a good way. Just going to an airport now is such an exhausting and draining experience.

12. What are you seeking elsewhere?

Peace of mind. A quiet life making music close to my loved ones, far from the noise and superficiality of a big megalopolis like Los Angeles. 

13. You made headlines around the release of Fantasy with some comments about EDM and about how you wish DJs would ask permission before playing your music. Have any since asked for that permission? If so, did you grant it?

A few have asked yes, and I thank them for it. Of course I grant it. I know that DJs helped my music to be more popular, and I’m thankful for it. It’s just a different world with different rules. I have to learn to let go sometimes. 

14. But, surely there are DJs who play other peoples’ music that you enjoy. Maybe? Was there a particularly great set you’ve been to recently?

I don’t think I’ve ever listened to a DJ, no. It’s not my culture and [I’ve] never been attracted to the club scene.

15. What’s one song you wish you had written?

16. Do you have guilty pleasure music?

No, I don’t like this expression of guilty pleasure. If you get pleasure listening to something then it’s just good!

17. The proudest moment of your career thus far?

Being myself and making the records I want. 

18. What’s the best business decision you’ve ever made?

I hate the word “business.” I don’t like talking about success, money etc. Being able to make music is a gift, and that’s all I care about.

19. Who was your greatest mentor, and what was the best advice they gave you?

Justin Meldal-Johnsen . Moving to L.A. and meeting him was a blessing. He helped me find myself in so many ways. I always go to him when I need guidance. He’s like a brother to me, and I love the fact that he always says what he thinks, even when it hurts. 

20. One piece of advice you’d give to your younger self?

Be happy, music is cool.

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M83 Announces New Album Fantasy, North American Tour Dates

The post M83 Announces New Album Fantasy, North American Tour Dates appeared first on Consequence .

Anthony Gonzalez has readied his ninth album as M83 .  Fantasy  arrives March 17th via Mute, and M83 will take the record on the road with a North American tour that begins in April. What’s more, first single “Oceans Niagara” is out now.

“I wanted this record to be very impactful live,” M83 said of Fantasy. “The idea was to come back with something closer to the energy of [2005’s] Before the Dawn Heals Us . The combination of guitars and synths is always in my music, but it’s maybe more present on this new record than on the previous ones.”

That emphasis on guitar is sure to make M83’s upcoming tour especially interesting. The North American trek begins April 10th in Phoenix, Arizona and wraps up May 16th in San Fransisco. After that, Gonzalez will head to Europe for a handful of summer dates. See his full tour itinerary below, and grab tickets via Ticketmaster beginning Friday, January 13th at 10:00 a.m. local time.

Buzzing synths and swirling guitar combine into a triumphant melody in “Oceans Niagara,” a song Gonzalez said was meant to create “this sense of friendship. Listening to that song, I imagine people running, driving fast, or riding spaceships together. It’s this sense of going forward, like a magic potion that you take to discover new worlds. Beyond Adventure!”

Pre-orders for Fantasy are ongoing. Watch the video for “Oceans Niagara” below, and scroll onward to see the album’s artwork and tracklist .  The record follows M83’s 2019 album  DSVII ,  and marks Gonzalez’s first release since celebrating the 10th anniversary of his seminal album  Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming   back in 2021.

Fantasy  Artwork:

Fantasy  Tracklist: 01 . Water Deep 02 . Oceans Niagara 03 . Amnesia 04 . Us and the Rest 05 . Earth to Sea 06 . Radar, Far, Gone 07 . Deceiver 08 . Fantasy 09 . Laura 10 . Sunny Boy 11 . Kool Nuit 12 . Sunny Boy Part 2 13 . Dismemberment Bureau

M83 2023 Tour Dates: 04/10 — Phoenix, AZ @ Van Buren 04/11 — Albuquerque, NM @ Revel 04/13 — San Antonio, TX @ Aztec 04/14 — Austin, TX @ Stubbs 04/15 — Houston, TX @ White Oak Music Hall 04/16 — Dallas, TX @ House Of Blues 04/18 — Nashville, TN @ Marathon Music Works 04/19 — Atlanta, GA @ Eastern 04/21 — Philadelphia, PA @ Franklin 04/22 — Washington, DC @ Anthem 04/23 — Boston, MA @ Roadrunner 04/25 — New York, NY @ Terminal 5 04/28 — Montreal, QC @ MTELUS 04/29 — Toronto, ON @ History 04/30 — Royal Oak, MI @ Royal Oak Music Theatre 05/02 — Chicago, IL @ Riviera 05/03 — St. Paul, MN @ Palace 05/05 — Denver, CO @ Mission 05/06 — Salt Lake City, UT @ Ogden Twilight 05/08 — Portland, OR @ Schnitzer 05/09 — Vancouver, BC @ Commodore 05/10 — Seattle, WA @ Showbox SoDo 05/14 — Pasa Robles, CA @ Paso Robles Winery 05/16 — San Francisco, CA @ Fox Theater 06/07 — Sigulda, LV @ Sigulda Castle 06/08 — Vilnius, LT @ Lukiskes Prison 06/10 — Helsinki, FI @ Helsinki Sideways Festival 06/24 — Výstaviště Praha, CZ @ Metronome Festival 07/07 — Hérouville-Saint-Clair, FR @ Beauregard Festival 08/12 — Trenčín, SK @ Grape Festival 08/13 — Budapest, HU @ Sziget Festival

M83 Announces New Album Fantasy, North American Tour Dates Carys Anderson

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M83 Set The Tone For A New ‘Fantasy’ Album With The Psychedelic Lead Single ‘Oceans Niagara’

M83 (aka Anthony Gonzalez) officially announced that his new album, Fantasy , is dropping later this spring.

He unveiled the reveal by also releasing the lead single, “Oceans Niagara,” which offers listeners a psychedelic journey of synths and guitars . The music video for the song was directed by his brother Yann.

“I wanted to create this sense of friendship,” Anthony shared in a press statement. ” Listening to that song, I imagine people running, driving fast, or riding spaceships together. It’s this sense of going forward, like a magic potion that you take to discover new worlds.”

As for the rest of the forthcoming Fantasy album, he aimed to include a stronger lyrical presence — as an attempt to change the pace for a ninth studio release.

“I wanted this record to be very impactful live,” Anthony added. “The idea was to come back with something closer to the energy of Before The Dawn Heals Us . The combination of guitars and synths is always in my music, but it’s maybe more present on this new record than on the previous ones.”

Fans will soon get the opportunity to hear songs from the record live , as he also dropped dates for a new North American tour. Tickets go on sale starting January 13 at 10 a.m. local time.

Listen to “Oceans Niagara” above. Below, find the Fantasy album art and tracklist, as well as M83’s upcoming tour dates.

1. “Water Deep” 2. “Oceans Niagara” 3. “Amnesia” 4. “Us And The Rest” 5. “Earth To Sea” 6. “Radar, Far, Gone” 7. “Deceiver” 8. “Fantasy” 9. “Laura” 10. “Sunny Boy” 11. “Kool Nuit” 12. “Sunny Boy Part 2” 13. “Dismemberment Bureau”

04/10 — Phoenix, AZ @ The Van Buren 04/11 — Albuquerque, NM @ El Rey Theater 04/13 — San Antonio, TX @ The Aztec Theatre 04/14 — Austin, TX @ Stubb’s Waller Creek Amphitheater 04/15 — Houston, TX @ The Lawn at White Oak Music Hall 04/16 — Dallas, TX @ House Of Blues 04/18 — Nashville, TN @ Marathon Music Works 04/19 — Atlanta, GA @ The Eastern 04/21 — Philadelphia, PA @ Franklin Music Hall 04/22 — Washington, DC @ The Anthem 04/23 — Boston, MA @ Roadrunner 04/25 — New York, NY @ Terminal 5 04/28 — Montreal, QC @ MTELUS 04/29 — Toronto, ON @ HISTORY 04/30 — Royal Oak, MI @ Royal Oak Music Theatre 05/02 — Chicago, IL @ Riviera Theatre 05/03 — St. Paul, MN @ Palace Theatre 05/05 — Denver, CO @ Mission Ballroom 05/06 — Salt Lake City, UT @ Ogden Amphitheater 05/08 — Portland, OR @ Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall 05/09 — Vancouver, BC @ Commodore Ballroom 05/10 — Seattle, WA @ Showbox SoDo 05/14 — Paso Robles, CA @ Vina Robles Amphitheatre 05/16 — Oakland, CA @ Fox Theater

Fantasy is out 3/17 via Mute. Pre-order it here .

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Electronic / Rock

March 20, 2023

Many people have a defining moment of their childhood; for  M83 ’s Anthony Gonzalez, childhood seems like the defining moment of his life. Each album since 2008’s John Hughes-inspired  Saturdays=Youth has communed with a specific set of nostalgic keepsakes, whether that be  Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness ( Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming ), classic Nintendo scores ( DSVII ), or  Punky Brewster  ( Junk ). While Gonzalez has been uncharacteristically mum on the subject of the ’80s and ’90s ephemera that inform M83’s new album, its wide-eyed zeal signals the band’s continued interest in reliving those early pangs of wonderment that adulthood cruelly snuffs out. It’s called  Fantasy  because of course it is. The first (and only) words on lead single “ Oceans Niagara ” are “Beyond adventure!” because of course they are.

Fantasy  represents a course correction after  Junk ’s more playful vibe, but it’s also a slight reclamation of that album’s bright, garish elements. In a classic “return to form”-baiting move, Gonzalez delicately throws  Junk  under the bus in the press release: He says he let “negative things,” namely his distaste for “the world going too fast,” influence that album, while this time, he yearned to recapture the “energy” of 2005’s youthfully dramatic  Before the Dawn Heals Us . The timing for his return to that album makes perfect sense: M83 have always been inspired by 20-year-old aesthetics, and now their early material is old enough to fit the bill. 

The big emotions of songs like “ Don’t Save Us From the Flames ” and “ Teen Angst ” are back, but, befitting  Fantasy ’s name, they’re harder to pin to real-world concerns like car crashes or hormones. The patient build and bottomless vocal harmonies of the cavernous ballad “Us and the Rest” tug at heartstrings, but the lyrics contrast all that pathos with sci-fi absurdity. Here is the second verse in its entirety: “Hello freak!/Can you see the sky ladder/By the limbo café/Leading to the green ray?/Sometimes it fades…” Sure, you could argue that listening to M83 for the lyrics is like watching Terrence Malick films for the dialogue, but  Fantasy  is by far the once-mostly-instrumental band’s most verbose offering to date. 

Gonzalez has said that he wanted to be more “present” this time, in the interest of achieving a more “personal” album, and at times, like the  10cc ’d-out closer “Dismemberment Bureau,” we get a clearer picture of the balance between his long-standing reverence for bygone media and his creeping sense of dread about what’s replaced it. “Do you miss the day/Of human revolution,” he and Kaela Sinclair ask, invoking one of the 20th century’s biggest cultural game-changers: “Television/What a good way to learn/About us, and the heirs of our land.” Those moments of clarity are fleeting.  Fantasy is certainly wordier than its predecessors, but if anything, the added syllables muddy up the message for a band that’s been defined by snappy, fantastical one-liners—“The city is my church”; “We own the sky”; “I’ll travel in your dreams.” Instead, songs are dominated by phrases better suited to advertise Mountain Dew: Dune Edition: “cosmic adrenaline,” “immortal energy,” “limitless star,” and “metal rapture.” Though they sometimes aid, or at least complement, M83’s head-in-the-clouds world-building, the writing on this album doesn’t reflect Gonzalez’s professed interest in revealing more of his own psyche. To be fair, it’s hard to envision what deeply personal M83 lyrics would even look like at this stage in their career. The high-wire drama of  Before the Dawn Heals Us  and  Saturdays=Youth are the closest they’ve ever come to relatable, but even that felt like an extension of the band’s exaggerated and intensified vision of late 20th-century adolescence. 

The music offers a much more legible roadmap for understanding where M83 are today, 20-plus years into their lifespan. Gonzalez might seem to be following a familiar trajectory: from unexpected breakout hit to lukewarmly received reaction to, now, an attempt to console day-one fans. But that narrative’s a bit too neat. It ignores the merits of the risks that Gonzalez took on  Junk , and the unexpected left turns of that album that carry over to  Fantasy . There’s nothing quite as knowingly unhip as a Steve Vai guitar solo (“Go!”) or a reanimation of the corpse of Taco’s chintzy 1983 synth-pop cover of “ Puttin’ on the Ritz ” (“Bibi the Dog”), but every hint of krautrock cool is paired with unabashed camp. If I had to guess what’s on  Fantasy ’s moodboard, I’d go with the  Giorgio Moroder -produced  NeverEnding Story   theme song and the iconic, pan-flute-led  intro to the ’90s educational children’s show  Eyewitness . 

The interplay between sounds that read as retro chic and those that sound impossibly dated is fascinating, an ever-shifting conflict within M83’s work that reveals larger truths about pop culture’s arbitrary nostalgia-recycling complex. At one point in the early 2010s, “ Baker Street ”-style wailing saxophones couldn’t have been more uncool, yet they helped turn “Midnight City” into an inescapable hit. The main battlefields here are the songs “Deceiver” and “Sunny Boy,” both of which begin with distant, solemn intros but then morph into more playful shapes when the beats drop. The M83 of old would’ve piled on massive drums and melodrama, but here, Gonzalez opts for an  Avalon   strut and a “ Major Tom ” boogie, respectively. M83 was once maligned for its dramatic ’80s pomp, but today, that’s precisely what tempers the impact of  Junk ’s brasher sonics.

Gonzalez and producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen pulled out all the stops on  Fantasy ’s sound design—the album credits list 37 different synths or keyboards and include an “effects and treatments” section that reads like the entire pedal department of your city’s largest Guitar Center. In its opulence, pursuit of writerly sci-fi imagery, and obsession with the band’s legacy, this album feels even more labored over than the ambitious  Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming  (which, despite having nearly twice as many tracks, is only seven minutes longer).

What  Fantasy  is missing isn’t any one synth preset, or a cultural reference for the next season of  Stranger Things  to popularize. It just lacks urgency. The best M83 songs aren’t necessarily complex, multi-movement epics, but they go  up , taking us skyward and sparing no gut-punches along the way. The cascading “Oceans Niagara” has some of that going for it, and “Earth to Sea” offers some much-needed catharsis in the middle of an album otherwise split between midtempo plodders and peppy boppers. But otherwise it feels like Gonzalez has held onto teenage aesthetics while stripping them of the theatricality that is the true source of their power. Without the emotional stakes,  Fantasy is just a narcotized Neverland. 

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The Past, Present, and Future of M83

After nearly seven years between proper albums, Anthony Gonzalez returns this week with ‘Fantasy,’ his immersive ninth album that hits his nostalgic sweet spot but doesn’t wallow in his history

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Anthony Gonzalez admits he hasn’t seen a lot of new movies in the past year, but the M83 mastermind probably still thinks the Oscars got it all wrong this past Sunday. A few weeks before the release of his ninth album, Fantasy , he reveals The Fabelmans as his favorite movie of 2022 and quickly realizes it’s the most painfully on-brand thing he could say. “It’s all about nostalgia!” he says with a laugh, and “nostalgic” is right up there with “epic” and “cinematic” as the most commonly used adjectives to describe M83’s music. Yet he also sees something aspirational in Steven Spielberg’s recent work—for the master’s ability to find nuance and resonance in his origin story decades into his career, and for his habit of splitting the difference between “one for the studio and one for me,” retreating from the zeitgeist for populism with an art-house heart.

After finishing the vocals for his first proper pop album in seven years, Gonzalez tells me, “I felt like I gave so much energy and heart that I ended up crying a lot.” While this man has written a song called “My Tears Are Becoming a Sea,” M83 fans never think about Anthony Gonzalez himself crying an entire body of water. Similarly, for a project so often connected with outsized, hyperbolic emotions, the most surprising sound I’ve ever heard on an M83 song is a commonplace vocal affectation, popping up about 45 minutes into Fantasy .

On the albums he’s made over the past 22 years as M83, you might hear distorted synthesizers that sound like guitars or distorted guitars that sound like synthesizers. Beck could show up , but so might a toddler telling a story about magic frogs . There may be slap bass, sax riffs, and Ron Burgundy jazz flutes that imply a deep love for ’80s shlock, with an uncredited Steve Vai guitar solo to confirm it. But toward the end of new song “Kool Nuit”—a prog rock–Italo disco odyssey that can sound normal only within the context of M83—a man lets out an anguished scream, something we hadn’t even heard on songs titled “Car Chase Terror” or “Teen Angst.” A straightforward expression of pent-up anger is so out of character for M83 that Gonzalez, himself, isn’t even actually sure he did it. “Screaming was almost as sufficient as crying, to let it all out,” he says. “It feels like I’m alive.”

I love this little moment of trad rage for him, in part because it proves that M83 is still capable of surprise on an album that has largely—and accurately—been played up as a course correction after a solid decade of struggling with the pressure and obligations that come with achieving just about everything he’s ever set out to do. And knowing this eruption came directly from Gonzalez, it opens up a conversation about whether I can believe the PR boilerplate that Fantasy is “his most personal album yet.” “I feel like I say that on every album. I’m not sure that means anything really,” he jokes. And indeed, having to explain a PR boilerplate stands as one of the many reasons he prefers to recuse The Life of Anthony Gonzalez from M83’s music. 2016’s Junk was also quite personal, a result of his own fame-induced freak-out and the desire to freak out the squares who stumbled into the tent. “It was strange to enter a new world that I didn’t have access to before, and I don’t think I liked it that much,” he says.

To the degree that the lyrics of Fantasy invite deeper analysis—“Beyond adventure!” “I believe in the darkness!”—none are intended to provide a window into Gonzalez’s politics or his feelings about fame or whether he wants to have kids. (On that note, he flatly does not—when I ask about a Game Boy Advance marooned in his bathroom, he claims that “all the toys here are mine.”) But he’s correct in that every M83 project is personal. Not “personal” as we’ve come to expect from indie musicians at M83’s level in 2023, the result of a massive shift toward singer-songwriters and “feeling stuff” music where artists inspire frightening parasocial relationships based on personal disclosure, on and off the record. Rather, Gonzalez is “personal” like a movie director, expressing his artistic and philosophical sensibilities through an immediately identifiable house style: neons and pastels, soft-focus reverb, blinding synths, gated drums. Gonzalez admits that he spent most of the pandemic watching older movies and reiterates that Fantasy connects him to his teenage years, which creates an odd tension; when I talk to him, he’s 42 years old, meaning that his teenage years do not all coincide with the majority of his sonic palette. As we speak, he is wearing a T-shirt from the Matthew Broderick–Michelle Pfeiffer film Ladyhawke , which came out when he was 5.

This is the fifth time I’ve had the privilege to interview Gonzalez since 2011; I don’t say “privilege” because Gonzalez is an open book or a legendary raconteur. Quite the opposite: “I just want the world to forget about me,” he told NME earlier this year , a prime example of how his pull quotes are typically about how much he’d rather avoid press altogether. Our original plans to catch up were dashed when a historic snowfall hit Southern California; rather than conduct an interview over Zoom, he insisted we still meet in person. “To be on TV, to be filmed, even showing my face on a webcam talking to my family on Sundays is something I can’t do,” he admits.

When we first met a few weeks before the release of Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming , Gonzalez had taken a number of massive, irreparable steps toward establishing M83 as a player in the mainstream. He had made the permanent move from his native France to Los Angeles and, in the wake of 2008’s Saturdays = Youth , opened for Kings of Leon and the Killers—despite owning none of their records. “I was in a little bubble with my friends and family. It was almost too easy after a while,” he said at the time . “Midnight City” had been out for a few months by that point and was already M83’s biggest hit. By the end of the year, it had made the late-night rounds and was named Pitchfork ’s no. 1 song of 2011. But it wasn’t “Midnight City” yet, a song that will be used in future period pieces to signify “early 2010s” the way “Fortunate Son” does for the Vietnam era. The Victoria’s Secret and Gucci commercials were yet to come, as was its usage in France’s UEFA Euro 2012 broadcasts, and its appearance in French erotic dramas, a Katy Perry docudrama, and 22 Jump Street. It’s very likely to reach a billion streams on Spotify by the end of this year.

“When I moved here 12 years ago, I made [ Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming ] and I didn’t expect anything from it,” Gonzalez says, though his ambitions feel like revisionist history, given how he once likened the album to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness . “All of a sudden, I was not an indie artist anymore.” Most of the co-headliners on this spring’s Just Like Heaven festival can relate: acts like MGMT, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Empire of the Sun, and Future Islands that happened upon a few massive hits during the late aughts and early 2010s, before the total conflation of “indie” and “pop” and the dominance of streaming.

Gonzalez’s first project after Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming was the least indie thing imaginable, scoring the soundtrack for Tom Cruise’s 2013 sci-fi brainteaser Oblivion. This was an overt attempt by director Joseph Kosinski to replicate a previously synergistic French connection, as he also helmed the 2010 Tron reboot that featured the first original music from Daft Punk in five years . Hollywood Reporter described Oblivion as “dramatically caught between its aspirations for poetic romanticism and the demands of heavy sci-fi action,” which is about as astute of an M83 assessment as I’ve ever read.

But when I caught up with Gonzalez right before its wide release, he could barely conceal his disillusion. “I started to work on this project with a lot of hope, saying, ‘Oh, I’m going to do something super special and original,’” he groused in 2013 . “But you can’t really, because there are so many people involved and so much money in the game that it’s hard to change things. Hollywood kind of sucks the life out of you very quickly.” Despite about $300 million in box office earnings, Oblivion was considered a flop. At a time when similarly revered electronic artists like Dan Deacon and Oneohtrix Point Never are frequently called upon to score major motion pictures, Gonzalez is content to work exclusively with his filmmaker brother Yann. “I have a film agent that didn’t call me in 12 years,” he flatly states.

Gonzalez has copped to being “scared” of “Midnight City” due to both its popularity and how it would be used as a comparative point for anything he could do next. “I’m already stressed about the reviews of my next album, and it’s not even done yet”— this was two years prior to Junk . Every M83 album to that point was a moon launch; what happens when you finally get there? It’s a question that just about every artist who makes a game-changing double album has to face. Sign O’ the Times begat Lovesexy , a small and strange record that somehow failed to break the top 10. Roger Waters plumbed the depths of his psychosexual neuroses with The Wall and followed it with The Final Cut , an impenetrable concept record about post-war Europe. Right this moment, Billy Corgan is likely still grumbling about how the reception of Adore effectively ended his imperial phase.

“After the success of Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming , I could’ve stopped everything—how am I gonna beat that, it’s impossible,” Gonzalez says, and it took about five years for him to offer an answer. I don’t see M83 as a one-hit wonder and I don’t think he does either, despite making a joke or two about his reception as a festival headliner: “People are expecting the hits ... one, in my case.” It’s just that his subsequent hits took a far more circuitous path. “Wait” was the fifth and final single from Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming , arriving nearly a year and half after “Midnight City.” It didn’t really catch on until two years later, when director Josh Boone demanded its inclusion in the film adaptation of The Fault in Our Stars . A year after that, “Wait” was used to great effect in a 2015 Bose commercial that starred a teenager about to experience her first kiss ... until her father interrupts and turns on “Skidamarink” instead. “Outro,” the third M83 track to clock streaming numbers in the hundred millions, inspired so many sync licenses that a Huffington Post article demanded, “Dear Hollywood: Please Never Use This Song Again.” That was nearly nine years ago.

This is the sort of fame that Gonzalez could live with—to be both ubiquitous and totally anonymous at the same time. The success of Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming didn’t jeopardize Gonzalez’s privacy. It’s likely that most M83 fans still don’t know what he looks like, as he never appears in his own videos. Living in Los Angeles, Gonzalez says, “If you’re not a model or musician, you don’t exist.” But the opposite is somehow also true—it’s a lot easier for these people to blend in while in Los Angeles, a sort of “industry town” where most residents know not to bother you.

But “Midnight City” was a hit , a meme, the first thing Gonzalez made that escaped his quality control. As an electronic band that played danceable music, M83 was destined to be lumped into the thriving EDM festival economy. And in 2012 they were booked as a top-line act at Ultra Music Festival in Miami—“the world’s premier electronic music festival”—alongside Skrillex, David Guetta, Tiësto, Justice, and Fatboy Slim. After about a half hour of technical difficulties—remember, they’re largely a band amongst DJs—M83 played “Midnight City” and an abridged version of “Couleurs,” that was it. The Miami New Times ran two separate articles on this disaster (“M83 at Ultra Music Festival 2012: Technical Issues Ruin Live Performance,” “M83 on Ruined Ultra Performance: ‘Our Deepest Apologies’”) and a third when the band returned several months later. Worse yet, “Midnight City” soon became a staple of EDM DJ sets, its indelible opening riff just another drop in a Serato bank. “It makes me cringe. I hope these people are not gonna come and see my show,” Gonzalez sniffs. “It’s that way with society, there’s a lot of people I see online following me that I absolutely don’t want to have anything to do with.”

Now, there isn’t a trace of punk rock in M83’s music. Still, Gonzalez describes 2016’s Junk as the outcry of a “cocky little rebel” within. The cover art was not compared to McDonald’s Fry Guys, nor a Michael Mann or John Hughes still. Whereas past albums were likened to Tangerine Dream meets Mineral or Smashing Pumpkins via Brian Eno, Junk touted Punky Brewster and Who’s the Boss? as primary influences. The importance of M83’s presumptive sincerity is best exemplified by 2008’s “Graveyard Girl.” Here’s a sample lyric—“She worships Satan like a father / But dreams of a sister like Molly Ringwald.” During the bridge, said Graveyard Girl takes the mic and whispers, “I’m 15 years old, and I feel it’s already too late to live. Don’t you?” To be clear, this song rules and would obviously be fucking ridiculous if Gonzalez hadn’t spent the past seven years committing to the bit. But whereas M83 was always serious —even at their sweetest— Junk dared to be silly, which caused the entire foundation to collapse in the eyes of critics. It’s a little difficult to tell whether Gonzalez is disappointed with the reception of Junk or his own performance, but it also ensured that M83 wasn’t going to get any bigger than it already was, which was sort of the whole point.

Though Junk could have been seen as a preemptive strike against his own backlash, the title was also Gonzalez’s first attempt at social critique—alluding to the disposability of art and, when he reflects upon it today, artists themselves. Gonzalez was relieved at the positive reception of “Oceans Niagara” in January, especially as he spent the night before its release in terrible gastric distress after stress-eating a giant hamburger. “What shocked me was all these comments like, ‘Oh, M83 is finally back!’” he says. “If you don’t release an album every year or play a festival every summer, you don’t exist anymore.”

M83 didn’t stop making new music after Junk , at least if you count the ambient collection Digital Shades Vol. 2 or Knife + Heart , a low-stakes soundtrack for Yann’s ’70s Paris period piece. Yet if Gonzalez himself longed to be forgotten, the influence of M83 still loomed large in his absence. For the rest of the 2010s, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming set the course for synth-pop, and therefore, pop music at large—it’s easy to hear the influence of “Midnight City” in the 1975’s more arena-ready moments, or Taylor Swift’s 1989 , or even the last War on Drugs album; but his earlier, more abrasive work is likewise notable in the cutting-edge electronic pop of Porter Robinson and Jane Remover. Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming also created a cottage industry for its coproducer Justin Meldal-Johnsen, who was tapped to steward synthy sonic pivots for Paramore, Tegan and Sara, Jimmy Eat World, and even blackgaze titans Deafheaven .

Gonzalez demurs when I ask whether he’s noticed the long-tail influence of M83 on 2020s pop culture—“I’m extremely shy and don’t hang out with other musicians, so I don’t get this sense of my music influencing others.” But if there’s a component of “borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered ’80s” to M83’s music, his most popular work imagines a universe similar to the one in which we now live. Junk predates the entire Stranger Things franchise, and also Wednesday , which is essentially a longform version of “Graveyard Girl.”

Understandably, in a time of unabashed ’80s boosterism and reboots, content creators have gone directly to the source. Gonzalez says he received a few Netflix offers that were “absolutely insulting,” and spent the last year working on a video game that will never see the light of day. Perhaps in the past, these experiences would’ve pushed Gonzalez even further away from his signature sound. “But there’s always something [in these projects] that tells you, ‘Why did you get into this?’” he explains. “You should be writing a new album or being on the road with your own project, because I know that I’m in control of things and I feel maybe more sane working on a new M83 album.”

In a roundabout way, Fantasy truly does speak on where Gonzalez sees himself as a 40-something artist; he speaks of a “new chapter” and even a “new career” beginning with Fantasy , intertwined with a quite literal desire to return to his roots. Though he’s very deep into the process of rehearsing for M83’s upcoming tour, he spent the previous eight months back in France swimming, hanging with old friends, and playing guitar without any pressure to create new music. He hasn’t put a timetable on anything, but Gonzalez suggests his sights are set on living back in Antibes, having exhausted everything Los Angeles had to offer his more achievement-oriented former self. “In France, it’s a way more simple way of living—less about looks, more about your spirit,” he explains. “And my parents are getting older and I want to spend more time with them. Musically, L.A. doesn’t bring me anything I need anymore.”

Yet, for all the times Gonzalez has described M83’s music as a tribute to his adolescence, one in which he played in both blues and Sonic Youth–inspired indie rock bands, he’s never been asked ... would teenaged Anthony Gonzalez actually like Fantasy ? “If I was 16 or 17, I’d probably like to listen in my car and run fast,” which immediately brings to mind the second-most surprising thing I’ve heard on an M83 album. Toward the end of “Earth to Sea,” an immediate laser-lit highlight, I hear not the voice of Kim or Jessie or Graveyard Girl or any of the stand-ins for Anthony Gonzalez’s teen dreams. As with “Kool Nuit,” I hear the reckless, joyous youth he speaks of so fondly and to which he’s dedicated this entire project—“the deeper end ... I FUCKING LOVE IT!” “I still want to grab that feeling and not let it go because truly I don’t—” he responds, “I don’t feel like I’m 42.”

Ian Cohen is a writer and registered dietitian living in San Diego. His work has appeared in Pitchfork , Spin , Stereogum , and Grantland .

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M83 at The Theater at Virgin Hotels, Las Vegas, NV, USA

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M83 at Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles, CA, USA

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