Feelings

This is music that operates at cinematic scale while pretending to be a love song. The synthesizers arrive in waves, each one larger than the last, and the production creates the sensation of being lifted incrementally off the ground — not suddenly, but through accumulation, so that by the time you're fully airborne you've forgotten the moment of departure. M83's characteristic approach to texture is present throughout: sounds that behave more like weather systems than instruments, drum machines that hit with both precision and mass, a sense that what's being described is less a feeling than the memory of a feeling, which is always larger and more saturated than the original. The vocal, when it appears, is processed into something hovering between human and artifact, intimate and distant simultaneously. The song sits squarely in the emotional geography of adolescence recalled from adulthood — not accurately, but mythologized, the way summers from childhood expand in retrospect to fill an entire season with light. It would soundtrack a drive on an empty road at dusk, or the end of a film you're not quite ready to leave, or the precise moment when something you've been waiting for finally arrives and you realize you're not sure what to do with it now that it's here.