You need to listen to M83’s icy post-rock recording “Dead Cities, Red Seas, Lost Ghosts”

New York City was hit by a severe snow storm last week. And inevitably, watching the snow fall, wandering the eerily quiet streets after dark, people hunkering down inside and staying warm, I hit the M83 student record, Dead cities, red seas and lost ghosts.

Before Nicola Fromajo left the band and Anthony Gonzalez adopted traditional pop song structures, saxophone solos and teenage angst, M83 released two albums of mostly instrumental music. The self-titled debut album is somewhat forgettable, but the second finds the French duo inspired by the repetitive bombast of Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Dead cities is a decidedly French twist on post-rock greatness, building blankets of sound out of drum machines, analogue synthesizers, and tightly compressed guitar.

There is a sense of liminality to Dead citiesAn eerie atmosphere that lives up to its name. Listening to the gently repeating melody of “Be Wild” as the track’s layers slowly build up, it’s impossible not to imagine walking through a once bustling city that is now newly deserted. America picks up panic The twilight zone “Where is everyone?” As frantic drums, My Bloody Valentine-esque guitar, and unstable synths build to an early crescendo.

However, you can tell something is wrong from the first moment. The recording begins with the 54-second song “Birds”:

The sun is shining

The birds are singing

Flowers grow

Clouds loom as I fly

The computerized voice is initially awash in digital distortion, then slowly morphs into a quiet tone that sounds inherently untrustworthy. There is no sun. There are no birds. And there are no flowers. The album opens with Lying to You before launching into the “Unrecorded” highlight.

“Unregistered” sounds like the mission statement for the record. Analog arpeggios, driving drums, drone guitars, manipulated vocals, and cinematic strings combine in a wall of sound associated with snow. Listening to tracks like this, it’s shocking that it took Hollywood another 10 years to recruit M83 to score a movie (2013). Forgetting).

M83 would eventually go on to record retro-indebted pop, scoring hits like “Kim & Jessie” and the absolutely inevitable “Midnight City.” But before that, the group explored something more cinematic and open-ended.