Anthony Gonzalez has essentially been making music for movies his entire career. The widescreen pop of M83 has been effectively used in skate videos, Nicholas Sparks romances, Britney Spears documentaries, CW fairy-tale adaptations, and tear-puddled YA-novel adaptations; “Outro,” the mountain-scaling closer from the project’s massive and marvelous 2011 album Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, has popped up in so many commercials and movie trailers that The Huffington Post once published an in-vain plea to cease syncs of the song entirely.
All this malleable retrofitting of the M83 catalog speaks to the project’s core values dating back to the total blowout that was 2005’s Before the Dawn Heals Us; specifically, nostalgia, the driving force behind so much popular culture over the past decade. Gonzalez may have not invented ’80s fetishization, but just the Breakfast Club’d cover art of 2008’s Saturdays = Youth is more than enough evidence that he anticipated the trend’s eventual cultural dominance years before Drive and “Stranger Things” became mass-cultural totems.
Gonzalez’s creative mind seems specifically attuned to the crafting of sounds that conjure distinct imagery—which is why it’s surprising that his official score work to this point hasn’t packed the same effectiveness. He did double-duty in 2013 with music provided for the sci-fi action film Oblivion and his brother Yann’s You and the Night; the former barely bore his imprint amid co-writer Joseph Trapanese’s orchestral blare, while the latter resembled variations on Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming’s starry-eyed theme and little else.
His third go-round in the scoring arena, for Yann’s latest Knife + Heart, was surprise-released last week in anticipation of the film’s imminent limited theatrical release; rather than engaging in watered-down retreads of his previous work, Gonzalez breaks from his own soundtracking habits with a sense of playfulness. Part of this new-feeling approach is undoubtedly owed to the subject matter of the film itself—an erotic slasher film that, when not inscrutably immersed in its own atmosphere, centers around a series of mysterious killings on a gay porn set and a leather-masked villain wielding a deadly blade tucked inside a black dildo.
With 1970s Paris as its backdrop, Knife + Heart is loaded with enough kitsch to suggest that nostalgia runs deep in the Gonzalez brothers’ bloodline—in order words, a suitable playground for M83’s own past-peddling tendencies. In a press release, Yann stated that he put forth to Anthony “straight and gay porn [film]” soundtracks as well as the scores that accompanied the filmic work of Giallo masters like Lucio Fulci and Mario Bava; the latter style’s melodramatic sweep shines through in the pounding-and-piping “Un Cocteau Dans Le Coeur,” while the freewheeling and groovy synth line of “Detective Rachid” radiates a grindhouse-esque seediness that mirrors the film’s bawdy-and-bloody approach.
More than anything else, though, the score for Knife + Heart—which encompasses bite-sized synth doodles, organ-grinding dread, and vaporous tone-clouds—finds Anthony Gonzalez again recalling his own work, this time in form instead of explicit sound. It’s hard not to hear Knife+Heart’s multifarious approach without thinking of Junk, M83’s quixotic 2016 LP that mostly traded the 4K synth-pop for stately French balladry, glassy keyboards, and schmaltzy, horn-laden hooks.
Junk represented a conscious retreat from M83’s signature style not unlike French electronic duo Air’s divisive 2001 album and Moon Safari follow-up 10,000 Hz Legend—itself coming off the heels of their shapeshifting, woozy score for Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides. With his score for Knife + Heart, it’s almost as if Anthony Gonzalez discovered Air’s beaten path and chose to travel it in reverse—a fitting and successful approach for one of the most capable retro fabulists of the last 20 years.
