M83‘s 10th album wastes no time reorienting you to Anthony Gonzalez’s neon-glow dreamworld, as the opening “Blister Sunrise” instantly plunges you into a synthgaze sound bath as swiftly as “Only Shallow” tosses you straight into the deep end on my bloody valentine’s Loveless. While Gonzalez has long excelled at translating his hallucinatory visions into heart-racing indie-pop anthems, the largely instrumental I Wrote You a Letter feels closer in spirit to his embryonic early-2000s work, where he wasn’t so much singing his heart out as letting his emotions well up into dam-bursting waves of electronic psychedelia. Here, Gonzalez lets the digi-drone drama build to operatic levels (and not just on the track that’s actually called “Opera”). Where “Losing Ground” begins as a serene soundtrack to a new day rising, by the end, its intensifying oscillations feel better suited to accompany a rocket launch. But there are also echoes of Gonzalez’s more esoteric film-score compositions, where his neoclassical and improv affinities come to the fore: If you’re the sort of M83 fan who can’t resist playing air-sax to his signature 2011 synth-pop bop “Midnight City”, you’ll have your work cut out for you when trying to keep up with the mercurial free-jazz meditation “Siren / Behold…Beasts”. Our Favourite Moment: When the gentle psych-folk finger-plucking of “Feeding Time” suddenly explodes into a synth-shocked, speed-prog stomper that sounds like Gonzalez’s tech-topian version of hardcore.