Before the double-album pop masterpiece that was Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming brought them widespread acclaim, M83 was an obscure, mostly instrumental act that blurred the line between shoegaze, post rock, and electronica.
On paper, the transition from experimental instrumental band to Billboard Charting Pop Group seems like it would yield albums that sound like completely different bands. However, the group’s sense of composition gives Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts the same sort of emotional storytelling and cinematic soundscapes that made Hurry Up such a huge hit.
Where Hurry Up was an ambitious sprawling album with an anything-goes sort of sonic palette, Dead Cities uses a small handful of timbres. The album is performed by only two people, Anthony Gonzalez and Nicolas Fromageu, who makes his last M83 appearance here. The duo paints with walls of sawtooth-wave and string synths, monosynth leads, glitchy drum machines, and the occasional electric guitar, sometimes creating the illusion of a single sound.
But don’t think that a limited number of sounds means the album sounds small. These tracks are positively grandiose. From the moment the robotic-spoken word into “Birds” leads into “Unrecorded,” the album bursts with an epic, emotional energy that never lets up. And even though there are no words here (there are some unintelligible vocals chopped up on “0078h“), the songs tell clear stories. The bouncing lead single “Run Into Flowers” feels all the world like a singalong summer jam, even without anything that could be called a chorus (as I type this, my wife is humming along with it). There’s a single, repeated vocal line that’s buried under layers of keyboards, but it’s hardly a focal point. “In Church” portrays the full, unashamed awe of spiritual reverence with an imposing organ progression with swirling synths.
“On a White Like, Near a Green Mountain” is pensive and reverent, building slowly before bursting into “Noise,” which is close as this record gets to Explosions in the Sky-style post rock—soundwise, that is. Compositionally, Dead Cities is just as cinematic and climax chasing as the post rock giants at their best. “Cyborg” even feels a bit like some of the more electronics-heavy tunes on Explosions’ later album The Wilderness. “Be Wild” has a touch of old school video game music—an influence Gonzalez would explore more fully on Digital Shades, Vol II. “Gone” tempers the synth-heavy sounds with more realistic sounding strings, making a track that absolutely belongs at the climax of a fantasy film.
The album ends with “Beauties Can Die,” a piece that repeats a delicate toy-piano like keyboard part while layers of pads and sawtooth waves build on top of each other until it collapses into a long silence, followed by an ambient hidden track that plays like a long exhale after holding your breath the whole album. The vinyl edition also includes the seventeen-minute title track on the D-side, which feels like an even longer sigh.
What makes this album so special is just how emotive it is with such a minimal toolbox. While the sonic palette may be limited, the scope of the album is not. Dead Cities is just as moving an album as Hurry Up, but it does so with a handful of timbres and a total of maybe ten or eleven lyrics across the whole disc. That is a testament to Gonazalez and Fromageau’s skills as composers, and it serves as a stunning rebuttal to anyone that says electronic music is antiseptic and free of emotion.