Everything Sounds Like This at 2 AM

M83’s We Own the Sky has been living in my headphones for months—one of those songs that sounds best in transit, through a window, at night. Anthony Gonzalez built Saturdays = Youth as a kind of time capsule for teenage feeling: the Cocteau Twins references, the John Hughes soundtrack energy, the sense that something enormous is happening right now and tomorrow it won’t exist. The album came out in 2008 and I’m still catching up.

We Own the Sky is the version of that feeling that doesn’t break. It just keeps climbing. The video was art-directed by Matei-Alexandru Mocanu, then still fairly unknown, and it matches the song’s logic—oblique, saturated, slightly unreal. The whole package holds.