If ever there was a post rock crossover pop hit, it’s M83’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming. 

This record debuted at number fifteen on the Billboard Top 200. The bouncing single “Midnight City“, complete with a screaming saxophone solo, was ubiquitous. The group appeared on a number of late night talk show performances. Songs were played in commercials and movie trailers.

This is only made more impressive by the fact that it’s a double album by a band that made their name playing synth-driven drone music.

Of course, this wasn’t M83’s first foray into new-wavey pop music. Saturdays = Youth was released three years earlier and found the group employing more straightforward song structures. But while there were plenty of fantastic moments on that record, nothing came close to approaching the glistening brilliance of Hurry Up.

In the months leading up to the record, bandleader Anthony Gonzales made a lot of bold statements. He listed influences like Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, the city of LA (to which he had recently moved), and the infinite expanse of the human consciousness. As if that didn’t forecast big ambitions, he once described it as “very, very, very epic.”

Expectations were impossibly high, but by God, he delivered.

Across twenty-two tracks and seventy-three minutes, every moment of Hurry Up is an aural delight. It offered up some of the greatest pop songs of the year in “Midnight City,” the slapped-bass “Claudia Lewis“, the urgent “New Map,” “OK Pal,” and “Steve McQueen.”

But there’s still plenty of the old M83 on these discs. Nestled between the relatively straightforward pop tracks are post rock ballads and ambient interludes. Ballads like “Wait,” “Soon, My Friend,” and “My Tears are Becoming a Sea” burst with heart-rending cinematics. “This Bright Flash” has all the drama of an Explosions in the Sky track distilled down to two and a half minutes. “Another Wave From You” is a wash of sawtooth synths that would fit right in with the group’s more ambient work. “One Year One UFO” is a piece of jubilation that sounds a bit like a collaboration between Arcade Fire and Animal Collective.

You might think that a record this diverse might seem uneven or schizophrenic. In fact, that’s typically the M.O. of most double albums. But even as the group covers so much varied ground, Hurry Up is a singular, cohesive work. This is perhaps due to the boundless sentimentality that threads through the disk. There is no room for nuance or self-consciousness in the moods of these songs. Every moment is played with 120% sincerity, whether it’s a hazy of keyboard drones, a neon stab of synths, a children’s choir, or a child telling a story about a magic frog.

This album is a technicolor explosion of sonic storytelling, bursting at the seams with emotion. Anthony Gonzales’ voice often feels like it’s on the verge of detaching from his body and joining the ethereal orchestra of atmospheric noise around him. And while this sort of transcendent sentimentality is old hat for post rock (see also: Sigur Rós), when it’s melded with pop structures, it creates something uniquely inspiring and endlessly listenable.