M83 Heralds Ambitious New Album with 'Midnight City'

French dream pop band M83 are going big with Hurry Up, We're Dreaming, the hotly anticipated follow up to their 2008 breakthrough album Saturdays=Youth. The new record will stretch out over two discs, giving band mastermind Anthony Gonzalez room to experiment with new sounds and vocal techniques. The record, which was produced by Beck and Nine Inch Nails bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen, will also feature vocals by Gonzalez's regular collaborator Morgan Kibby and guest singer Zola Jesus, plus guitar by former Medicine member Brad Laner. Hurry Up, We're Dreaming won't be in stores until October 18th, but you can preview "Midnight City," the record's gorgeous and highly danceable first single in the embedded stream below.

Midnight City by M83

• 
  MUSIC Exclusive Live Chat With Linkin Park and Incubus
• 
  MOVIES & TV Peter Travers: 'The Avengers' Has it All
• 
  POLITICS Matt Taibbi: Jon Corzine Is the Original Zimmerman
• 
  VIDEOS Exclusive Premiere: Tenacious D's 'Tinnitus'

Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

More Song Stories entries »

Twitter