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OK Pal

M83

Anthony Gonzalez is doing drugs. “What do you think I feel, when I take, when I take it with you?” he sings on “OK Pal,” the showstopping centerpiece of M83’s new Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming. ”Somewhere else, somewhere else, somewhere else …” He’s on a trip, the kind you take without leaving your apartment. His partner tries to describe where they’ve gone: “We’re walking in streets, or what’s left of them,” she says, in the precious voiceover that has become an M83 staple. “I take your hand, and the city is slowly vanishing. There’s no crowd anymore, no cars, no signals.” Like Arcade Fire before them, Gonzalez and his partner have found that place where no cars go: the private, euphoric space occupied only by the young and in love. The song hints gently at our age of diminished expectations, its crumbling streets and disappearing metropolises. And yet it asserts, loudly, that those things don’t matter — not while these lovers are together, not while the drug courses through their veins. This is agony on Ecstasy — desperate yearning, transcended at last, but only until the drugs wear off. One of the year’s best. 

(track via discoblood)

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