Fantasy

M83

Released

Almost an unintentional companion piece to The Weeknd’s 2022 concept record Dawn FM, studio album number nine from unintentional hitmaker Anthony Gonzalez feels like a nostalgia-drenched run through an amazing eighties radio playlist that never quite existed — only in this case the dominant producer is Giorgio Moroder, not Quincy Jones (hard not to feel the wonder-evoking synthetic fantasy world landscapes of The Never-Ending Story in tunes like “Amnesia”), and instead of playing in your car it’s pushing through the static of a half-heard alarm clock radio speaker as you drift in and out of consciousness. A gauzy shoegaze-inspired mist covers the whole project. Whether it touches pastel-colored yacht rock (“Laura”) or the closest Gonzalez will probably get to poking the psychic scar of “Midnight City” (“Fantasy”), it keeps the mood dreamlike in a way only he can wrangle. Forty-odd vintage synthesizers went into the making of this somatic journey. They all got put to good use.

Jeff Treppel

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