The Child With the Saxophone

The music video had kids with telekinetic powers escaping from a facility, and there’s no real reason that should work as well as it does—but then, nothing about Midnight City should work as well as it does. A synthpop song with a saxophone solo performed by an actual child. A French musician who’d spent a decade making slow-building atmospheric records, finally letting everything collapse into pure pop. Released as the lead single from a double album in October 2011. It should feel absurd. Instead it sounds like the most natural thing in the world.

Anthony Gonzalez had been building M83 toward this for years—each record leaning further into the cinematic, from the drone and shoegaze of the early work through to the full-throated ambition of Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, where the cinematic and the pop finally fused completely. The first disc, anyway. The second disc is more of a promise he kept to himself. The first disc has Midnight City, which is enough.

The synths stack and climb, the vocal hook lands, and then two minutes in that saxophone arrives—played by a child, absurdly, perfectly—and the song opens into something that feels like being young and driving at night with nowhere specific to be. I wasn’t young and driving at night when I first heard it. Didn’t matter. The song offered the feeling anyway, at full volume, no questions asked. Still does.