If the last decade in pop music has taught us anything, it’s that nostalgia can be a double-edged sword. When it goes wrong, it’s about as satisfying as swallowing a mouthful of processed spray cheese. When done right, revisiting the tropes and aesthetics of decades past can go down nicely. M83’s 2011 double album, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, fell into the latter camp and—bolstered by its ubiquitous single “Midnight City”—transformed Anthony Gonzalez’s curious 15-year-old project into a soundtrack for Victoria’s Secret commercials and Tom Cruise sci-fi flicks. Surely this shift explains something about the new M83 album, the fascinating and somewhat flummoxing Junk.
Based on Junk’s downright goofy first single, “Do It Try It,” there was some indication that Gonzalez might be pulling the classic move in which a musician takes a hard left in reacting against the thing that made them famous. Since Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming was essentially the widescreen distillation of Gonzalez’s ’80s neon dreams, it would make sense if a defiant about-face toward all things synthed and saxophoned might be in store. But Junk is not that. Instead, it’s as if Gonzalez is doggedly determined to mine those same nostalgic influences all over again, just in much more arcane ways. As a result, Junk is arguably the weirdest record he’s ever made, but it’s far from the best.
Those familiar with M83’s back catalog will hear familiar touchstones on Junk—lush synthscapes, collaged narratives, insouciantly spoken French—but anyone looking for another “Kim and Jessie” or “Teen Angst” will be at a loss. The big pop moments here are centered around massive synth lines that could have been lifted off a Pointer Sisters record (“Laser Gun,” “Road Blaster”), or in the case of “Go!,” a gloriously wanky guitar solo courtesy of '80s axe god Steve Vai. Drafting Vai for a song that sounds like a tribute to songs that Vai actually played on gives the record a meta quality not unlike when Lady Gaga enlisted Clarence Clemons for a sax solo on her Springsteen-worshipping “The Edge of Glory.” So although it’s an undeniable fist-pump of an anthem in a similar lane as “Midnight City,” “Go!” treads so close to total irony that it becomes difficult to swallow, in the process revealing one of Junk’s most consistent flaws.
This kind of pure homage to slick ’70s and ’80s FM ephemera is so exacting in places, it almost makes you wonder: What is the point of remaking this into something new? That small voice grows louder when you hear the album’s instrumental tracks (“Moon Crystal,” “Tension,” “The Wizard”), where Gonzalez proves he can perfectly replicate the kind of incidental muzak that played in JCPenney dressing rooms circa 1983, or as the opening score of a “Too Close For Comfort” episode.
That is not to say that Junk is without its charms. “Road Blaster” is a pristine ’80s mega-single that never was—a slick hybrid of synthesized horns and Chic guitars that sounds as if it were made specifically to soundtrack a late-night joy ride around Hollywood in an old sports car. “For The Kids” is a saxophone-soaked ballad featuring Norwegian singer Susanne Sundfør, and it’s thoroughly gorgeous—until a voice-over from what sounds to be a ghost-child kicks in.
Gonzalez largely farms out vocal duties on Junk—like to Beck on “Time Wind,” a gently funky highlight from an imagined movie soundtrack—but the album’s best tracks feature his own voice. “Atlantique Sud” is a duet with Mai Lan Chapiron in which she and Gonzalez purr at each other in French, while “Solitude” features Gonzalez singing against a backdrop of strings that swell dramatically before eventually overpowering the song completely. The album closes with “Sunday Night 1987”—a song that serves as a tribute to the late Julia Brightly, a sound engineer with whom M83 had a long and devoted working relationship. Building on a somber piano melody reminiscent of Harold Budd and Cocteau Twin’s The Moon and the Melodies, “Sunday Night 1987” is Junk’s most stunning song, and the one that most resembles early M83 albums. It’s also the only track on Junk that doesn’t sound like a showy exercise in a defunct style, though ending with a Stevie Wonder-esque harmonica solo would come close if it didn’t provide an appropriately mournful final note.
It seems impossible that, seven albums in, Gonzalez doesn’t appreciate the possibly divisive nature of this album. You don’t call a record Junk and grace its cover with a couple of googly-eyed 21st-century Fry Kids without having some inkling that you are taking the piss. In the album’s press materials, Gonzalez is quoted as saying, “I wanted to make what I call an ‘organized mess’—a collection of songs that aren’t made to live with each other, yet somehow work together.” It’s a commendable idea and one that almost works—collecting these various bits of cultural detritus and refashioning them into something that is at once compelling and potentially disposable. In the end, though, it’s that feeling of disposability that makes the album’s title resonate more pointedly in the wrong way.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming was released in 2014. It came out in 2011.
