M83 – “Blister Sunrise”

It's the Friday before Labor Day weekend, and summer is pretty much over now even if it is still oppressively hot outside. That means it's a great time to let a sighing cascade of blurry synths hit your ear. So it's good timing that the always-evocative retro-indie maximalist M83 just dropped the first single of his upcoming album.M83's last proper album was 2023's Fantasy. Last year, the project's mastermind Anthony Gonzalez dropped two soundtrack albums, for the documentary Dakur Chronicles and the sci-fi art film Resurrection, under the M83 name. Over the summer, he announced plans to release a new M83 album called I Wrote You A Letter on his own Other Suns label. That record is set to come out in a few weeks, and Gonzalez just dropped the first single.When he announced I Wrote You A Letter on Instagram, Gonzalez wrote that he recorded it with collaborators Joe Berry, Clément Libes, and Benoit de Villeneuve. Opening track "Blister Sunrise" mostly sounds like classic M83, with a few new things in the mix. It's a majestic grand-scale vibe-out, and it feels both vast and dazed, like waking up to find yourself walking on the surface of Jupiter. As the song builds, though, it gets mo...