M83
On March 1, 2015, Anthony Gonzalez released his first new M83 single in three years. It was a deliriously odd glamdance track that sounded unlike anything in his catalog of music, titled “Do It, Try It.” The reaction was swift and not entirely encouraging. “I understand the need to embrace new directions and sounds, but this thing is not M83,” wrote one fan on M83’s official Facebook page. “It’s just the first song on the album...let’s hope the rest isn’t like this,” wrote another. Some offered defenses of Gonzalez’s right to explore different stylistic forms. Others unleashed their inner music critics, providing detailed critiques of the song’s processed vocals and keyboard textures. Most just repeated how much they loved his other albums and lamented that this new song didn’t sound like anything on any of them. No one seemed to have much enthusiasm for the idea of Gonzalez reinventing M83.
A few days later, and a few hours after the release of a high-profile interview that spent more time painting him as a brooding recluse holed up in an immaculately clean Los Angeles bungalow than it did discussing his new music, Gonzalez is in an engaging, if circumspect, mood. “I know that because of the success of the last album, a lot of people were expecting songs like ‘Wait’ and ‘Outro’ and ‘Intro’ and ‘Midnight City,’” he says. “But for me, because I’ve done that in the past, I wanted to get away from it and try not to surf on the success of the last album. Also, I was trying to prove to myself and other people that I could do something else, I guess.”
He has just announced the title of his seventh full-length release, Junk , and has revealed its artwork, a cartoony image of two brightly-colored blob-like creatures with a hamburger, hovering in space. This too was greeted with confusion and consternation, leading to speculation that Gonzalez was perhaps pranking his audience with such uncharacteristic choices.
If Gonzalez is stung by the polarized response to his latest creative choices, he doesn’t show it in conversation. But the reaction must be unexpected at the very least, coming as it does on the heels of his most widely-acclaimed and commercially successful release, 2011’s . That album—arguably the culmination of 10 years spent perfecting a distinct brand of dramatically sweeping electro-pop—produced “Midnight City,” the irresistible synth-pop anthem that landed in a series of high-profile commercials, sold a million copies in the U.S., and ended up at the top spot on numerous “best tracks of
