"We didn't need a story, we didn't need a real world/We became the stories, we became the places/We were you before you even existed." These eerie lines mark the entrance into the dreamy setting of M83's latest record, Hurry Up, We're Dreaming. Released Oct. 18 by the French synth-pop artist, this album marks a bold turn for Anthony Gonzalez, the guitarist, keyboardist, singer and songwriter for M83. A dual-disc album, Hurry Up, We're Dreaming is a product of Gonzalez's creative skill and investigation in the air of past double albums such as Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. As Gonzalez moves from darker electronic songs such as "Midnight City" to the feathery baroque folk sounds of others like "Soon, My Friend," the album offers a versatile stretch of varying emotional expressions.  

Hurry Up, We're Dreaming is equally haunting, inspiring and joyful as it explores the range of emotions experienced in life and dreams. At times when the music seems lost, bursts of clarity often surface from the ambient obscurity. Gonzalez commented that the album is "mainly about dreams, how everyone is different, how you dream differently when you are a kid, a teenager, or an adult." Highlights include "Reunion," as Gonzalez cries out "You make me feel myself/You make me feel my soul" in an energetic burst from the dark, melancholy, nostalgic preceding track "Midnight City," which echoes memories of drunken nights spent stumbling through urban chaos.  Many of the tracks are melodic instrumental pieces that serve to transition between the different atmospheres explored in each song. "Raconte-Moi Une Histoire" (Tell Me a Story) is a light and humorous song reflecting the surrealism of looking back to childhood and the gravity myth once held, as a little girl recounts a tale of a magical, psychedelic frog. Most of the songs are dominated by synthesizers, but the tracks also build to overwhelm the senses with a feathery blanket of perfectly placed harmonies.

On the second disc, "New Map" (kin to "Midnight City") is suggestive of a long lucid dream as Gonzalez sings, "There's a hole in your heart begging for adventure/On your own, can you face it?" The sound he creates completely immerses the listener while maintaining a chilling sense of distance and isolation. The guitar-dominated "Year One, One UFO" melodically builds into a feeling of awakening that is offset by the final five tracks, which get lost in a loosely defined ambience of obscure melodies and electronic drones. "Outro" concludes the album with the lyric "I'm the king of my own land," suggesting the control people strive to have over the ambiguous beauty of both dreams and reality.  

An impressive characteristic of this release is the similarity between each disc of the album. Each song on one disc has a sibling on the other, making each part unique yet oddly reminiscent of its related track, like two separate dreams with the same aesthetic impact, flowered into different defining subtleties. Every song is saturated with dense emotions reflecting the loneliness and nostalgia Gonzalez felt when first moving to Los Angeles from France before composing the album.

On the second leg of their tour for Hurry Up, We're Dreaming, M83 will be playing at Buffalo's Town Ballroom May 7 with similarly atmospheric Swedish indie band I Break Horses. The stylistic variety and emotional twists and turns of the new album suggest M83 will put on a memorable experience that will continue to travel through the mind of the audience even after they pass out in drunken exhaustion and transition into the surrealism of sleep.