The Daily Spin, December 31
M83 | Hurry Up, We're Dreaming
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
This is it - kinda. We’ll have a monthly recap go live tomorrow, and a year-end wrap-up to follow shortly after - but this is the 365th album. Jesus.
I’ll save most of the sappy words for the year-end retrospective, but thank you all for your readership. It truly means the world.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite songs from each album right here.
Album: Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming (2011)
Artist: M83
Link:
I picked this album because it only felt right to close the year on a note like this - ethereal, brilliant, and blindingly beautiful.
With every release, M83 - real name Anthony Gonzalez - reinvents himself, changing the shape of electronic music as he seismically shifts what it means to be an artist in the modern era, blending disco, shoegaze, synth pop, and dance music into one cocktail, ethereal, rich, and lush, almost vibrant to the point of being overwhelming. He’s done it with each of his works up to this point, and Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming is certainly no different.
The clear standout example of this is ‘Midnight City’ - it feels like an impossibility that you haven’t heard this song, maximalist to the extreme, synthetic to the very end, a power anthem to end all anthems. This is Gonzalez bringing down the house - and he does it on track two of a 22-track double album. That’s bold.
It doesn’t stop there - though no track hits those same frantic highs, ‘Steve McQueen’ and ‘New Map’ do their best to keep pace, while Gonzalez find himself at the opposite end of the universe with ‘Wait’ and ‘My Tears Are Becoming A Sea’, tracks that build from slow nothingness to sound that will fill and complete any space you occupy.
Perhaps it’s just the timing of it all, but I find ‘Outro’ rather poignant as well - the slow build from string base into sweeping glory, touched only by the vocals that Gonzalez himself includes, before it all falls into the hands of a simple piano melody to take us home, one chord the final goodbye.
One part space opera, the next part synthetic dreamworld, another part dance craze, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming is an album about everything and nothing, attempting to draw lines between the wide world of human existence, an hour and thirteen minutes of introspection on the silliness of it all and the stunning beauty of what matters. It feels an album to celebrate each day, if you want - and that’s worth hearing.
Rating: 9.3/10
Best Tracks: Midnight City; Wait; Outro
Worst Tracks: Ok Pal