Review: M83 – I Wrote You A Letter

M83’s “Midnight City” arrived in 2011 with the force of a saxophone and swelling of synths, widening like a horizon glimpsed from a moving car.

For a generation of millennials in their early 20s, it became the sound of a specific feeling — not quite nostalgia, because the thing being mourned hadn’t been lost yet, but something adjacent to it. The feeling of being young and knowing, somewhere beneath the euphoria, that this particular version of everything wouldn’t last.

Anthony Gonzalez had a gift for that ambivalence, for music that reached for the infinite while staying rooted in something achingly human. Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming was the album that housed it, and it remains one of the decade’s defining records.

Fifteen years on, that feeling has calcified into something more complicated. The millennials who clutched that album have mortgages now, or don’t. The city in the song is harder to dream of. Gonzalez, meanwhile, has spent the intervening years scoring films, releasing ambient compilations and navigating the particular difficulty of being a musician whose most beloved work keeps casting its shadow forward.

I Wrote You a Letter, his tenth album and a deliberate return to the largely instrumental territory of his earliest records, is an attempt to step out from under that shadow by walking further into the dark.

The attempt is sincere and intermittently beautiful, which makes its shortcomings harder to overlook. Opener “Blister Sunrise” is the most arresting thing here — a slow, luminous build that cuts abruptly to silence before erupting into distorted, throat-shredding chaos. It is genuinely startling, the most abrasive thing Gonzalez has done in years, and it promises an album of controlled disorder and creative risk. What follows is quieter and more equivocal than that promise suggests.

The record meanders through long instrumental passages where interesting ideas — a saxophone line on “Siren Behold… Beasts,” the woodwind textures of “Aged,” the Sigur Rós-inflected orchestration of “Opera” — appear briefly and then dissolve before they’ve been fully explored. The tempos are mostly glacial, which would be fine if the stillness felt purposeful, but often it feels like absence rather than restraint.

Gonzalez made this record with Benoît de Villeneuve, the producer who worked with him on Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts in 2003 — the album that preceded M83’s lyrical and orchestral turn, and his last entirely instrumental record until now. The reunion makes sense as a gesture, a reaching back to the moment before the expectations were set. But reaching back is not the same as rediscovering. I Wrote You a Letter is full of self-reference without quite finding what it’s looking for in the archive.

There are moments of real grace. “Heart Motion Foto” is delicate and affecting, a piano figure that doesn’t try to be more than it is. The closer recedes rather than resolves, which feels appropriate for a record so preoccupied with distance — a letter sent, as the title implies, without certainty of reception. Whether it arrives is another question.

M83 has always been more than “Midnight City,” and this record is proof of that in ways both intended and unintended. The song endures because it captured something true about longing and time. I Wrote You a Letter is searching for that truth by different means, and the search itself still has value here, even when it comes up short.