From the moment they were announced as the Super Bowl halftime performers, it seemed like Maroon 5 had nothing to win and everything to lose. What’s the payoff when you’re a band who’s basically embedded in the DNA of radio music? I can’t imagine it was for the check or the publicity. Was it an attempt to regain lost cred after they transitioned to mainstream pop, after frontman Adam Levine took on a corny Proactiv deal and cornier judge position on The Voice? Did they hope it would launch them into a new echelon of ubiquity? Did they think they would, at the very least, have fun? Maybe — but by the time Levine was fully shirtless and dutifully gyrating on screen, it was clear that nobody was having fun.

That’s not to say the performance was a disaster. To the band’s credit, they checked off all the boxes of a mass-appeal stadium concert: fan favorites, fireworks, guitar solos, performative horniness, and the occasional shout-out to Atlanta. But if I wanted to watch a 39-year-old in a bomber jacket and gold chains loyally sing “This Love” with total emptiness in his eyes, I could’ve gone to any bar in New Jersey on a Thursday night. “She Will Be Loved,” the highlight of their medley, featured stripped down production, but it also peddled a cloying montage of sappy couples releasing lanterns covered with words like “DANCE” and “BELIEVE.”

Guest features Travis Scott and Big Boi fulfilled their roles of briefly lending the night some cool. Scott actually provided a moment of relief when he literally exploded onto the stage, delivering the start of “Sicko Mode” alone and engulfed in fire. His energy, contrasted with the glossy set-up that insulated Maroon 5, felt electrifyingly sincere. It wasn’t that Maroon 5 fell flat because they were unaware of what the people wanted; they fell flat because, in the formulaic pursuit of giving the people what they want, they lost any semblance of authenticity.

After Cardi B and Rihanna both allegedly turned down the slot in response to the NFL’s treatment of Kaepernick, and after so many people called for a boycott of the event, it’s unsurprising that Maroon 5 would get on stage and deliver a performance divorced from racial and political reality. From the mostly-black gospel choir brought up during “Girl Like You” to the heavy-handed “ONE LOVE” that the lanterns spelled out in the sky, superficial unity and sickly feel-good uplift pervaded the show.

Here’s where I have to reveal a bias: I’ve watched Prince’s 2007 Super Bowl performance countless times, and I’m convinced it’s the best there’s ever been. But this also means that, when Levine shouted, “Can I play guitar for you right now?” I was acutely aware of how Prince said nearly verbatim the same thing in his climactic final song. Maybe I’m paranoid — maybe it’s just the polite way to start a guitar solo. Yet I can’t help but think that this was a concerted effort to walk in the footsteps of bona fide legends, and a failed one at that. Perhaps this is what made the performance so distinctly hollow — not the fact that Maroon 5 is a bunch of indifferent corporate rockstars, but that for 13 minutes, this bunch of indifferent corporate rockstars went through the motions of trying to prove so hard that they’re more than that.

Super Bowl LIII Halftime Show was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Everybody loves a good breakup song. There’s something about it that captures both the best and worst in us, whether it’s the mourner or the forgiver or the pissed off car-keyer. And while there’s a time and place for those bleak lost-love songs, my favorite breakup genre by far is the celebratory one, the dancing-on-my-own, never-needed-a-man-in-my-life one. Lucky for me, that seems to be the theme of this year, as we’ve been gifted with a treasure trove of warm, loving songs exploring some of the ugliest emotions. Among the biggest hits in recent weeks (including Robyn’s new album and Ariana Grande’s fantastic “thank u, next”) is Carly Rae Jepsen’s return single, her first since the critically-acclaimed Emotion came out in 2015. “Party For One” is anthemic, blissful, and — exactly as the name suggests — an unapologetic celebration of being alone.

Ever since she released “Call Me Maybe” in 2012, Jepsen has developed a reputation for crafting stupidly catchy pop songs that turn foundational emotions into the best sing-along tracks. “Party For One” doesn’t stray far from this formula, and while you could fault Jepsen for staying within her comfort zone, you could hardly argue that she doesn’t dominate it. The song starts by acknowledging the difficulties of moving on — “Tried to let it go and say I’m over you / I’m not over you” — before the opening instrumental riff takes a backseat to lush synths, crisp percussion, and Jepsen’s increasingly confident declarations of self-reliance. The glossy production builds on Jepsen’s ownership of being alone, making it sound more attractive with every verse. “You don’t want my love / If you don’t care about me / I’ll just dance for myself / Back on my beat,” she sings on the chorus, with a slight rasp and carefree nonchalance. It’s not just a song about self-love; it’s a song that makes self-love sound cool. “Party For One” all but makes explicit the physical aspects of romantic independence (“Making love to myself / Back on my beat”) but it’s not just a song about masturbation, in the same way it’s not not a song about masturbation. There’s a lot involved in self-care, both physically and emotionally — all Jepsen seems to be saying is that it should be fun.

The music video for “Party For One” starts with Jepsen checking into a hotel, majorly channeling Margot from The Royal Tenenbaums. Once the song starts, it becomes a montage of vignettes looking in on Jepsen and the other idiosyncratic characters letting loose in the privacy of their rooms. From the older woman packing a dildo to the man eating spaghetti by the handful in the bathtub, everybody dances, cries, and finds freedom of expression in their solitude. At the pre-climactic bridge of the song, the power cuts out and forces everyone down to the lobby: a dozen individual parties converge on a moment of communal revelry as the song explodes in the background. But the video doesn’t end there, instead concluding with the cast silently taking the elevator back to their rooms, Jepsen closing her door and happily sliding to the floor. Both the song and video are a reminder that we’re not alone in feeling alone. But more importantly, they also remind us that even when given the chance to be with others, there’s value in choosing to dance by and for ourselves.

Carly Rae Jepsen, “Party For One” was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m a little too young to grasp the scope of Robyn’s influence on today’s happy-but-sad pop scene. The Swedish artist’s last album came out in 2010, when I wasn’t having cathartic mid-club breakdowns as much as I was attending well-lit, emotionally-stunted bar mitzvahs. There’s definitely been an evolution in dance music since then: the Max Martin sound once had a monopoly over club playlists, but today’s dance floor soundtracks are both weirder and sadder, so often affecting an upbeat melancholia that Camila Cabello literally has a song called “Crying In The Club.” Robyn is a torchbearer of this genre, having set the stage for the Icona Pops and Carly Rae Jepsens of today — Lorde even performed on Saturday Night Live with a picture of Robyn propped on the piano. On Honey, Robyn returns to the forefront of euphoric, devastating pop with a softness that only makes it more powerful.

There’s a method to Robyn’s sadness — her manifold illustrations of mourning, heartbreak, and resilience celebrate tears as a necessary part of recovery. The album opener, “Missing U,” is steely and glittery, a pulsing dance track about the tragedy of loss. (Robyn has said it’s about the death of her longtime friend and collaborator, Christian Falk.) It’s a colorful blur of grief and reckoning, perhaps the most classically “Robyn” song on Honey. The rest of the album is a little more hopeful. “Because It’s In The Music” cushions romantic pining in disco uplift, finding empowerment in the inevitable wallowing that occurs when we hear that song we shared with that ex. Even as Robyn sings “I’m right back in that moment / And it makes me want to cry,” her falsetto is prominently airy in contrast with the bare-bones instrumentals, her voice soaring above the shimmery synths and low bass. The minimalist production on Honey also gives Robyn room to carve eccentricities into the sonic whitespace. “Beach2k20” is a dryly funny spoken-word track that sounds like Cabo meets Japanese lounge funk meets a videogame soundtrack. “Human Being” features an eclectic synth beat peppered with outbursts of whirs, hums, and whispers. But ultimately, the production lets Robyn center herself throughout Honey, to locate herself after the storm and start anew — “I’m a human being / Baby don’t give up on me now / I’m a human being,” she sings on “Human Being,” presenting a starkly human contrast to the sparse, sci-fi instrumentals.

Honey is so catchy from start to finish that you might not notice the dramatic emotional arc that takes place. By the last track, Robyn has reconciled with her heartbreak and moved on — “Never gonna be brokenhearted / Ever again / That shit’s out the door / I’m only gonna sing about love / Ever again,” she pledges. “Ever Again” is liberating, a blissfully weightless song that promises to work through a relationship instead of running from it, and Robyn ends the album with a casual confidence that may be more vulnerable than the moving articulations of sadness she’s perfected throughout her career. Honey is Robyn at her most optimistic, and maybe it’s not going to last — but it is a welcome phase in her sad, happy, weird, and beautiful career.

Honey was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“You’re my number one / You’re the one I want” — those are the first words that Mitski Miyawaki sings on Be the Cowboy. “Geyser,” the opening track and first single off of the artist’s fifth album, unfolds brilliantly and turbulently, forgoing a verse-chorus structure to instead build layer upon layer. “I will be the one you need / the way I can’t be without you / I will be the one you need / and I just can’t be without you,” Mitski declares, just before emphatic guitars and percussion close out the song. It could be about a lover, her music, or herself, but it hardly matters what the specifics are. Mitski has captured the alluring, violent escalation of a universally-felt longing, the strange sense of power we find in moments of desire.

Be the Cowboy may be about longing. It may be about artistry, or identity, or freedom. You could probably argue that it’s about literal cowboys. The album clocks in at a trim 32 minutes, but it covers an entire spectrum of emotion and personality. Lo-fi guitar rock transitions into country-tinged melancholia. Songs about anxiety segue into songs about fictional marriages. In a press release, Mitski explained that the album’s narrative is of a “very controlled icy repressed woman who is starting to unravel. Because women have so little power and showing emotion is seen as weakness, this ‘character’ clings to any amount of control she can get.”

We see this character construct play out on the album’s cover, an up-close shot of Mitski wearing a white floral cap and bright red lipstick, head turned toward us as a hand reaches to tweeze her mascara-covered lashes. The photo is startling, an image of Mitski in a moment of both showmanship and vulnerability, a moment of both confession and performance. Ultimately this album is one that speaks rawly, but also one that has been scripted and controlled — Mitski, it seems, wants us to remember that. It’s futile to seek perfection; it’s naive to assume nobody tries anyways.

Mitski has nailed this balance between the vulnerable and the spectacular. Be the Cowboy is sleeker than her previous works, doing away with much of the guitar distortion and vocal harmony that dominated past albums. Besides resulting in a higher-production sound, Mitski’s vocals are in the spotlight more than ever, and she rises to the occasion magnificently, projecting confidence even as her bare voice exudes a palpable fragility. The throbbing “Washing Machine Heart,” with vivid lyrics like “Toss your dirty shoes in my washing machine heart / Baby bang it up inside,” could have been a fiery song of distorted romance. But Mitski’s delicate lilting (“Do mi ti / Why not me?”) instead turns the track away from hardened angst and towards a bittersweet sentimentality.

Be the Cowboy dives into more genres than Mitski’s past albums, definitively proving there’s more to her than “just” indie rock. The many musical styles reflect a multiplicity of experience, a running theme on the album. Our emotions don’t always make sense, and we don’t always respond to the same things in the same ways. The minor-key “Old Friend” might be exactly what you need to lament a bygone love. But a jaunty pseudo-country song about “winning” a broken relationship — “Lonesome Love”, which features the excellent lyric “Nobody butters me up like you / And nobody fucks me like me” — could be equally therapeutic. A highlight on the album is the fantastically catchy “Nobody,” an airy disco/synth-pop jam that sees Mitski at her most blissful as she proclaims her loneliness into the ether. “I know no one will save me / I’m just asking for a kiss / Give me one good movie kiss and I’ll be alright,” she sings before entering the dizzily joyous chorus, which is composed of nothing more than the word “nobody.” It’s one thing to sing a happy song about a happy feeling; It’s another to turn a song about desperate loneliness into a giddy dance number. The latter is comparable to the subversive power of laughing while crying: with each “nobody,” it feels like Mitski gets a little lighter, her smile a little wider, her relationship with being relationship-less a little better.

Mitski’s last album, the acclaimed Puberty 2, was about the growing pains of adulthood and reckoning with the inherent transience of the very emotions we spend our lives chasing. Be the Cowboy seems in many ways like the reincarnation after such a quarter-life crisis, the stability of adulthood we assumed we’d find immediately after our teenage years. Emotions don’t get easier, but experience makes them easier to deal with. The same themes of love, work, anxiety, and doubt that spanned Puberty 2 are still being interrogated on Be the Cowboy: what’s different is the method of approach. “A Pearl,” a chaotic song about learning to move on from a toxic love, nonetheless features Mitski singing with a clear-headed strength that cuts across the lo-fi guitars. A steady reassurance underlies even her most heart-wrenching track, the elegiac closer “Two Slow Dancers,” which reflects on the tragedy of lost innocence over a haunting piano accompaniment. “We’re two slow dancers, last ones out” Mitski repeats as the song fades away, lines creeping with existential dread but also the comfort of company: we’ll have to exit eventually, but at least we can exit together.

In an interview with The Outline, Mitski revealed that the album’s name is in part inspired by the Marlboro Man, the all-American cowboy who branded a tobacco empire with his masculine swagger. “I would always kind of jokingly say to myself, ‘Be the cowboy you wish to see the world,’ whenever I was in a situation where maybe I was acting too much like my identity, which is wanting everyone to be happy, not thinking I’m worthy, being submissive, and not asking for more,” Mitski said. “Every time I would find myself doing exactly what the world expects of me as an Asian woman, I would turn around and tell myself “Well, what would a cowboy do?”” Be the Cowboy offers a refreshingly nuanced take on the diverse Asian American experience by offering representation, not in terms of large-scale visibility like Crazy Rich Asians did, but in terms of resonant relatability. The submissive stereotype facing so many Asian American women can feel inescapable, both externally and internally — on the other hand, the urge to retaliate against meekness with an anti-model-minority mentality can be as equally unpleasant. What Mitski has done with Be the Cowboy is find a way to reject both extremes and revel in the complex middle ground, reconciling rawness with control, spectacle with vulnerability, happiness with loneliness. It’s not that the album only speaks to Asian Americans, or that it was only made for Asian Americans. In fact, it reaffirms that the complex emotions and manifold experience Mitski lays bare on Be the Cowboy are generally universal. For the most part, we’re all trying to be and feel a little better. And for some of us, that looks like embodying another character, even just for a minute, to remind ourselves of who we really are.

Mitski, Be the Cowboy was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I have no proven calcium deficiency. I’ve never broken a bone, and when I think of drinking a tall glass of ice cold milk, I feel the strong urge to vomit in my backpack. When I grew up in Shanghai, my mom made me drink milk every day. Not regular milk, which is bad enough. But bagged milk. Let’s just pause for a moment and think about that. Milk. In bags. One fateful day my mom handed me a bag of milk and like the dutiful daughter I used to be, I stuck a straw in the top and took a tentative sip. And then a thick, alien membrane coated my entire throat. I threw up. A lot. I still have nightmares about it, honestly. And since that day, I have been resolute in my decision: milk is for babies. And dumb-ass adults.

Don’t get me wrong—I love dairy. I consume a wide and beautiful variety of dairy products at each meal. My diet depends on cheese to the extent where I lay awake at night and worry about becoming lactose intolerant. I’ve heard that 90% of Asians eventually develop some sort of lactose intolerance, and I’m terrified that I’ll be one of them. Cheese is my life. I can’t be funny about cheese. Humor is used to resolve conflict, and I have no conflict with cheese. But my feelings do not extend to the liquid side of the dairy family. It is a gross perversion of nature for grown adults to drink the breast milk of cows. Not to mention that enslaving dairy cows’ mammary glands to quench our thirst for a liquid that could at best be described as “not spoiled” is barbarism at its very best. You can take back your milkshakes, almond, soy, 2%, and skim. Take back your carcinogens, your lattés, your suspensions of fat particles in water. I want no part of this collective colloidal insanity. Got milk? Get the fuck out.

Is it excessive to write 500 words about a cover of a One Direction song? Maybe, but since I have a friend who had to be physically restrained from buying a life size cutout of the blonde guy from the group, I think this is subdued by the standards of the fan fiction era. Besides, I’m not actually here for the once-ubiquitous British boy band—their positive contribution to my musical landscape is solely thanks to indie goddess Mitski’s recent cover of their 2014 “Fireproof,” and that is why I’m here.

The original “Fireproof” opens with a cute acoustic guitar riff that remains on loop as the classic boyband beat kicks in perkily. Cue members of the band, who take turns on lead vocals while remaining members “oh” and “ah” barbershop-quartet style. The cymbals shimmer quietly alongside the slippery-smooth harmonies that insulate the chorus and the song plateaus, carrying on like this for another two minutes. There is no climax, no explosion, no bang, no whimper: One Direction’s “Fireproof” is a sticky, pleasant song loyal to its name—entirely incapable of igniting a spark.

Mitski’s cover begins with a low electric guitar rapidly and monotonously pulsing in play with a steady bass drum. It’s a dark-and-gritty foundation for the song, which has traded in its beachy pastel origins for a dystopian ember-red. New layers of the rhythm section erratically punctuate the first verse before piercing distortion catalyzes the chorus in an unbelievably satisfying release of instrumental tension. Mitski’s vocals are untouchable, maintaining a clarity in the grains of her lower register but emanating an unconventional strength in her lilting highs. A tidal wave of optimism, urgency, and lingering sadness is behind her voice in newly powerful lines like “Riding on the wind and I won’t give up.” It’s an invigorating and beautiful tragedy that Mitski paints with her vocals, and it’s not unique to this cover: look to her latest album, Puberty 2, for a gold mine of this mournfully galvanizing sound.

This sonic reconfiguration and dismantlement of boy band tropes does something that One Direction, in all their earnestness, couldn’t do: it makes the lyrics matter. Mitski replaces “I roll and I roll ‘til I’m out of luck” in the first verse with the “I roll and I roll ‘til I change my luck” that initially only ends the second verse—it’s also the resonating final line of Mitski’s version, which cuts out the superfluous last chorus. Otherwise, though, she stays true to lyrics that were written to make romance out of the fire-retardant (It’s like One Direction was making a PSA for fire safety, which is kinda endearing). But in her hands, “Fireproof” is repurposed from a nonflammable love song to an insurgent expression of passion and longing. Released exclusively on Bandcamp for their Our First 100 Days project, a collective album that uses proceeds to fund organizations tackling new challenges under the Trump presidency, Mitski’s “Fireproof” is a rallying cry that, despite its name, is fully capable of lighting a fire in (or under) all of us.

Based on Tarell McCraney’s In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, Barry Jenkins’ extraordinary second film is as much his as it is that of James Laxton, whose precise cinematography tells a story in and of itself. Moonlight (2016) is the 16-year bildungsroman of Chiron, a queer black boy introduced to us during his silent scramble through the shrubs and back windows of Miami.  Chiron’s journey, split into three parts, is grounded in his evolving sense of self, an identity inextricable from the unresolvable conflict painfully familiar to minorities in America. Instead of adopting the wavering camera shot typical of the Boyhood genre, a sleep steadicam, classical score, and lush coloring reject the cinematic expectations tied to depictions of poverty, queerness, and blackness. Visually and otherwise, Moonlight is a film crafted to subvert expectations, defy categorization, and assert itself as one of the most beautiful works of our time.

Driven heavily by dialogue despite a reticent protagonist, Moonlight zips through years of plot and monumental events, choosing instead to unfold on dinner conversations and jukebox tunes. The wandering plot doesn’t sacrifice fleshed-out characters, though, and the wonderfully-acted Chiron (played at various ages by Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes) isn’t alone in his multi-dimensional complexity. Neither Chiron’s drug-addicted mother, Paula, nor his father figure, Juan (who is also Paula’s drug dealer), slip into tragic symbols of their respective archetypes; rather, each is a well-defined character whose love for Chiron provokes serious inner conflict. Likewise, Kevin, Chiron’s schoolmate/friend/maybe-something-more, avoids the trap of becoming a lazy caricature used solely to drive plot. Moonlight’s universe of tangible characters packs an unsettling emotional punch in even the most restrained scenes. By focusing on specifics, Jenkins excels in making an intensely personal film that simultaneously projects a ubiquitous reality of American life.

Bathed in crisp reds, warm yellows, and glaring whites, Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight still manages to exude an unwavering blue through gorgeous, deliberate repetition. Blue is a defiant stroke of color throughout the film, appearing in Juan’s car, Chiron’s electric blue backpack, the antiseptic background of his high school, Kevin’s t-shirt, and elsewhere. Its repeated infusion, especially washed over the powerful last shot, references the origin story of McCraney’s play. Moonlight’s varying blueness is a claim of fluid identity, of active and passive self-possession, of nuanced and overwhelming self-expression, and of a constant yet ever-changing sense of self. Despite being a work whose power is in its dialogue, the brilliance of Moonlight isn’t easily described with words: the best articulation of it might be through color.

Dev Hynes, the artist and producer behind the “Blood Orange” act, released Freetown Sound less than three weeks after the Orlando shooting. In a post on Instagram, he dedicated it to the marginalized, writing, “My album is for everyone told they’re not black enough, too black, too queer, not queer the right way.” Hynes weaves their stories into his own unflinching self-portrait, delivered across 17 masterful tracks that glide from synth-pop to new-wave funk to electronica R&B.

Hynes’s voice is prominent in vision and craft, but he takes the backseat on vocals, letting female artists dominate his songs. Co-writer Lorely Rodriquez takes charge on the breakout single “Best to You,” singing, “I feel my bones crack in your arms,” from the perspective of a girl whose toxic relationship makes her feel like an disposable object. Hynes layers Rodriquez’s crystalline voice over a dance-inducing beat; the song represents his trademark melancholy party pop at its finest. Drag queen icon Venus Xtravaganza is sampled in “Desirée,” a chillwave funk groove relating the transactional life of the ostracized sex worker to that of a suburban housewife. Freetown Sound’s diverse list of collaborators also includes Nelly Furtado, Carly Rae Jepsen, and Debbie Harry. Hynes directs an ocean of voices: where a lesser artist would falter into cacophony, he locates an ethereal harmony.

The result is a rich tapestry illustrating life as a minority individual in a society that fears and threatens you. “Love Ya,” a cover of Eddy Grant’s eighties jam “Come On Let Me Love You,” transitions from galactic electronica to a jazz-house trumpet solo to vocals backed only by piano chords, spanning over a century of music defined by black voices. Hynes’ version ends with an interview sample of Ta-Nehisi Coates recounting how he, as a young black boy walking to school, agonized over his grip on a baseball bat. The cover of a Guyanese British musician’s song is interwoven with West African and reggae influences—Bob Marley’s granddaughter Zuri is even featured on vocals. The song, interspersed with diverting interludes, never culminates in an apex, and Coates’ excerpt itself is abruptly cut off. Hynes paints the journey of black existence, but it’s far from finished.

For the cover of Freetown Sound, Hynes chose Deana Lawson’s 2009 photograph “Binky and Tony Forever.” It’s an image of a man and a woman intimately intertwined, with the man seated on a bed and the woman standing, her face turned to stare defiantly at the viewer. A Michael Jackson poster hangs on an otherwise bare wall; the presence of the icon calls attention to Hynes’s own barrier-breaking work. The photo is polished, provocative, and lush, infused with raw emotion. In other words, it’s the perfect preface to Freetown Sound.

Expectations were high for Junk, M83’s first studio album following their Grammy-nominated Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming. Junk’s cover art is telling of the album’s sonic contents: tacky WordArt, Microsoft Paint, and oddball Happy Meal toys unite in outer space to create a collage of ’80s pre-adolescence and underlying cynicism. Despite being inspired by cheesy television shows like Punky Brewster and Who’s the Boss?, Junk is less optimistic than the ambitious Hurry Up. The dizzying combination of rippling anger and desperate nostalgia muddies the elegance of M83’s sound, but if Anthony Gonzalez wants this incongruity to force the listener into critical reflection, he succeeds.

M83 establishes a state of unapologetic disarray within the first few bars of the album’s opening song, “Do It, Try It.” Its jaunty ragtime piano starkly contrasts with heavily synthesized vocals. From this track forward, the 55-minute album embodies organized chaos, a hypnotic amalgam of smooth saxophone, glittering percussions, and mystical vocals. “Go!,” a galactic fist-pump anthem featuring French singer Mai Lan, draws strong similarities to M83’s hit “Midnight City.” “Sunday Night 1987,” gorgeous in its intense melancholia, is perhaps the strongest song on the album, but an exhilarating guitar solo in “Walkaway Blues” and lush vocals in “Atlantique Sud” also stand as testaments to Gonzalez’s talents as a musician and producer.

Standalone magnificence aside, Junk might confuse and even frustrate some listeners with its dogged dedication to reviving ’80s synth-pop. The aggressively dorky “Moon Crystal” feels trapped at a disco roller-rink in 1986, and Lan’s robotic countdown in “Go!” blurs the line between emulation and parody. The effusive ballad “For the Kids” features stunning vocals from Susanne Sundfør, but it echoes Fleetwood Mac to the point of rote replication, with the exception of a bizarre voiceover from a young child waxing macabre poetic. M83 thrusts listeners into the heartland of unflinching nostalgia, but Junk is as much a critique of modern art as it is an ode to 80s electro-pop. Discontent with modern music and culture gives Gonzalez’s schmaltz an ironic edge. It’s not clear, however, whether this newly acquired dissonance breathes refreshing realism into his epic music or wilts his cinematic masterpieces.

Junk’s complete disregard for subtlety makes it harder to listen to in one sitting than Gonzalez’s previous works, but taken in short spurts, it’s entirely entrancing. Shades of jaded cynicism now populate Gonzalez’s kaleidoscopic sound, yet his sincerity is still preserved. Pleading “Take over my dream/ Walk into a feeling” on “Do It, Try It,” Gonzalez maintains the belief that music can change the world. His latest attempt at affecting this change succeeds in making a splash, but possibly at a cost of easy listening