After Midnight City, There Was This

Midnight City ran itself into the ground through sheer overexposure—a great song that became a shorthand, then a cliché, then a sound you heard in car commercials and couldn’t unhear. Nobody blamed M83 for it. These things happen. But it meant that by the time Anthony Gonzalez and the rest of the band resurfaced with new work, you almost had to consciously reset what you expected from them.

The video for In the Cold I’m Standing asked very little of you. Two people meeting. Darkness. Smoke. Birds of prey somewhere in the frame. An undemonstrative camera, the kind that trusts the song to carry weight without help. It worked the way quiet things work—not immediately, but steadily, like temperature dropping.

The song itself had been around since 2005, buried on the LP Before the Dawn Heals Us, where it sat in good company alongside the kind of post-rock ambition that made you think of Sigur Rós and Mogwai—bands for whom a single note held long enough becomes something close to a feeling you don’t have a name for. M83 has always lived in that register: the grandiose and the private, simultaneously. Midnight City was the grandiose side getting out of hand. This was the private side, doing what it had always done, waiting for you to catch up.

I didn’t need it to be anything new. I needed it to remind me why I’d paid attention in the first place.