M83 announces new album I Wrote You a Letter for September

Anthony Gonzalez, the creative mind behind the French project M83, has announced a new album. I Wrote You a Letter will be released on September 25 via Other Suns, Gonzalez's own label. It follows 2023's Fantasy and contains nine tracks, including the already released lead single 'Blister Sunrise'.

That single immediately gives a sense of the direction Gonzalez has taken. The track opens with a wave of surging synths that climb ever higher, with layers of distortion stacking up into the sweeping, cinematic crescendo that made M83's name. Beneath that dreamy surface lies a rougher shoegaze weight, which eventually dissolves into a sparse, raw piano composition. It's a sound that fits the deliberate choice Gonzalez made for this album.

Gonzalez began working on the demos for I Wrote You a Letter in the summer of 2024, driven by a desire to work more instinctively and reconnect with the looseness of his earliest recordings. "This record reflects my state of mind over the past few years," Gonzalez said in an official statement. "I'm deeply disillusioned by the world we're living in. I wanted something less calculated, more spontaneous. More punk, in a way." The result moves between guitars, dark electronics, ambient passages and fractured pop, without anchoring itself to any single chapter in M83's history.

Gonzalez worked on the album with Joe Berry, Clément Libes and Benoît de Villeneuve. The latter has a special connection to the project, as his collaboration with Gonzalez dates back to the album Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts. Jean Philippe Talaga, the original designer of M83 and founder of Goom, the label that first released the project, also returned to handle the album artwork.

Alongside the preparation of this new album, Gonzalez recently composed the score for Resurrection, a 2025 science fiction film. His 2008 album Saturdays=Youth is now considered a classic within the dream pop canon. With I Wrote You a Letter, Gonzalez seems to be once again opting for a more personal and less polished sound, something that fans who hold his earlier work close to their hearts will surely appreciate.