M83's 'Before the Dawn Heals Us' Turns 20

When teen angst reaches adulthood

I can’t recall the exact first time I heard Before the Dawn Heals Us by M83, but it wasn’t long after it was released when a friend gave me his CD and I put it on my iPod. What I do remember, quite vividly, is standing outside in a bitter Massachusetts winter, freezing and waiting to meet a friend when I looked at my iPod to check out the name of the song coming out of my headphones which was currently blowing my mind. It’s a moment I’ll never forget because it’s one that felt destined to happen. The name of the song was “In the Cold I’m Standing” and it was the exact thing I was doing when the song found me and took hold. Of course Anthony Gonzalez, at this point the band’s sole leader and songwriter, had nothing to do with this serendipitous moment aside from naming the track, but the wild circumstance was permanently burned into my mind and I think of it immediately when I listen to the track today.

It’s fitting that the album, released in the United States twenty years ago today, can provide such a sensational soundtrack to the dark winter moments since its anniversary falls during the exact season, but even with its nocturnal album cover, the record still can exude a certain brightness. With lush textures that resonate deeply within the listener, there’s a lot to unpack and it plays like a journey and a real album rather than just a collection of songs. Marrying shredding, muscular shoegaze-inspired guitars with overwhelming synths and radiant electronics, the album offered up a whole new world all within itself. Cinematic not just in scope and sound, but with bits of dialogue and skit-like scenes woven into the mix, the album struck as a definitive statement from an artist that was soon to be on the verge of a sonic breakthrough.

Lining up in the band’s now expansive discography, Before the Dawn Heals Us marks a pivotal moment in Gonzalez’s career. The work leading up to this album presents a band that forges ahead through dense and heavy sounds that feel like they’re meant to be experienced in their full collection vs listened to as individual tracks and singles. Previously focused on largely ambient and instrumental works that weave in elements of electronica and dream-pop, this was a turning point to something new and more inviting. Everything that would come after this album would take things even further into a pop realm and send the band to heights never imaginable if things had stuck to the current trajectory.

Sitting in the middle of this career path, Before the Dawn Heals Us gives us the best of both versions of M83. The aforementioned “In the Cold I’m Standing” and “Teen Angst” are brilliant compositions that transform the heavy, thick guitars and put them into new light, like the shine of a Slowdive song, while “Don’t Save Us from the Flames” and “Can’t Stop” mark the shift towards something poppier and unveils a newfound energy that propels the sound into a new sonic plateau. Listening to the album now, it’s like you can hear the ideas come alive and recognize the band as one on this incredible journey towards something bigger than their dreams.

M83 never struggled with creating a massive sound and from the very beginning, the grandiosity of their music has felt impactful. If the Bauhaus mentality of “less is more” was ever said to Anthony Gonzalez, he never applied that to his musical creations. If anything, M83 did wonders with making their music take up more space in a room than you could possibly imagine and with their third album, it became clear that Gonzalez and company had fully tapped into his songwriting power. So much so that it was clearly only a matter of time before Gonzalez would be tapped to make epic scores for actual films vs creating his own horror-inspired storylines to fit into the soundscapes he was already so gifted at creating on his own.

The majestic tones on the album are still so striking two decades later and it’s hard to think that there was ever a time when I thought M83 would be a band that never moved beyond the realm of real audiophiles and certainly never to the point where you’d be hearing any of their songs at a bar or a club. Still, all of that future magic is clearly seeded here and the jump towards the synth-pop styles that would follow don’t feel as monumental as they did at the time. In fact the real magic of Before the Dawn Heals Us is just how apparent the pop sensibilities were so early on in the band’s career.

It’s also important to call out just how in tune Gonzalez was at this point with getting right up to the line of absurdity and melodrama without actually crossing it like he would on future works. The issues that populate the appropriately titled Junk are that the bombast is so extreme it’s hard to tell why Gonzalez would actually make the choices of including relentlessly tedious guitar solos and overly dramatic flourishes when he knew exactly how to control these tendencies in the past. The belabored drum fills work on this record actually add to the emotions instead of walloping them over the listener’s head. It’s the difference in how a song like “*” can still sound so invigorating, like you’re in a high speed chase, and not something too ridiculous to let play all the way through.

Any band that sticks to too much of a good thing eventually loses the polish and reveals the cracks underneath and the more recent albums from M83 suggest that might be the case now, but twenty years ago, they were locked in on something that felt so unique and inspiring. It’s no wonder that once Gonzalez started to shift towards major pop melodies and vibes that he himself would get lost in the sauce and fall into the trap that so many copycats would also succumb to over the years. Still, the magic that permeates from this album still sparkles with the same shine and glow as when it first dropped two decades prior. It’s still a powerful record that acts like a door to nostalgia, but never once does it come across as a dated body of work. Before the Dawn Heals Us was a transcendent album in 2005 and sounds just as magnificent as ever today. While the album artwork leans into the title, the image of a city in the dark lit up solely by the lights of the building, by now the dawn has certainly arrived and the album has indeed healed us from whatever terrors arose in the night.