Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming

Midnight City

“Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming” is the sixth studio album by French electronic music band M83, released in 2011. It is M83’s last album with keyboardist Morgan Kibby and the band’s first full double album.

Prior to recording Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, Anthony Gonzalez had moved from his native France to Los Angeles. Describing the move in an interview, Gonzalez said: ‘Having spent 29 years of my life in France, I moved to California a year and a half before the making of this album and I was excited and inspired by so many different things: by the landscape, by the way of life, by live shows, by movies, by the road trips I took alone… I was feeling alive again and this is, I feel, something that you can hear on the album.’

Gonzalez’s tour with The Killers, Depeche Mode, and Kings of Leon, in addition to his road trips to Joshua Tree National Park, also heavily influenced the album. Gonzalez cited the ambitiousness of albums such as ‘Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness’ by Smashing Pumpkins as the reason he made ‘Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming’ a double album. In addition, he described the two discs as brother and sister, with each track having a sibling on the other disc.

Gonzalez recorded the album as a way to remember his childhood. Gonzalez explained to ‘Spin’ magazine that ‘Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming’ is ‘mainly about dreams, how every one is different, how you dream differently when you’re a kid, a teenager, or an adult. I’m really proud of it. If you’re doing a very long album, all the songs need to be different and I think I’ve done that with this one.’

Gonzalez described the album’s sound as a mix between the synthpop of ‘Saturdays = Youth’ and the more ambient work of ‘Before the Dawn Heals Us.’ Additionally, the album uses instruments not found on previous M83 albums, such as acoustic guitar, flute and saxophone. Critics have noted musical influences from ’80s artists such as Kraftwerk, Simple Minds, Peter Gabriel, and Harold Faltermeyer, as well as modern electronic artists such as Cut Copy.

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