Anthony Gonzalez, the architect behind the long-running French electronic project M83, has been living in the shadow of his greatest and most successful creation for nearly 15 years. Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming was released in 2011 to infectious acclaim as the culmination of the band’s work up to that point, and it has informed everything since. The past has driven the future. 2016’s Junk was purely reactive, retreating into eighties pastiche and hiding behind a cloak of guest vocalists, while 2023’s spaced-out Fantasy directly tried to summon the ghost of earlier work, coming across as a matte retread. Gonzalez saved his more exploratory and freeform ideas for his soundtrack work, both for real films (Resurrection, Knife + Heart) and imaginary video games (DSVII). No longer nostalgic for an embellished, potent youth, M83’s tenth LP I Wrote You A Letter is swarmed by memories of the rich, beloved music of Gonzalez’ early career. He is content to move back in time while the world rushes forward. At least one “back-to-basics” album is all but guaranteed after two-and-a-half decades of music, but rather than let Fantasy fill that role, M83 delves even deeper into their own past. Early collaborator Benoît de Villeneuve returns to the fold, filling the music with self-reference. Some of the familiarity comes from reinhabiting old sonic signifiers—the towers of synths and guitars still sound recognizably enormous, but here they’re rendered with greater coarseness, a rougher production sheen that has been missing since the hi-fi gloss of Before the Dawn Heals Us. “Feeding Time” samples the robotic voice from “Birds,” the opener of Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts. The chords grounding “Soldiers of Lust” are so incredibly reminiscent that they sent me down a rabbit hole to find which M83 track the song must be reworking (eventually, I came to the half-guessed conclusion that it must be a composite of quieter outros from Hurry Up). The richness of M83’s music persists, but they have (re)learned a bit of concision. Gonzalez’s core ideas, rippling through the different waves contained within each track, are direct and effective. This by no means suggests a lack of scale or ambition. If anything, the focus required to shave potential excess from I Wrote You A Letter after a decade of hour-plus LPs should not be taken for granted. The band has always been capable of making compact tracks, even as the albums are usually packed. Opener and lead single “Blister Sunrise” is the clearest example of that talent. No hesitation comes before a volcano of distorted synths and guitars erupts and stays in the red for all three minutes. A scream from Gonzalez affirms the track’s vivacity and gives it a bit more of an edge than usual. Even with a piano outro, it quickly establishes M83’s law of relative parsimony. The emotions and sounds remain direct throughout the album; however, they tend to wander on the longer pieces or stumble on the shorter. The latter half of the otherwise sax-squall-heavy “Siren Behold… Beasts” is typically pretty, pairing windswept piano and blushes of horn, but refuses to commit to being fully ambient, preferring aimlessness. This indecision is emblematic of the LP’s problems, ultimately slight as they may be. M83 incorporates new ideas, like greater use of woodwinds on “Aged” and “Opera,” alongside the aggressive, chopped synth stabs of the former or the Sigur Rós-ian vocal outro of the latter. These subtle textural augmentations are welcome, even if they can’t save the record from feeling noncommittal. Every ecstatic crescendo concludes without euphoria or release, often dissolving into spacey outros or faux-transitioning to a new section that isn’t given enough time to develop. Gonzalez knowingly plays with the sounds and ideas of his back catalog, trying to amalgamate something new from fractures of the past. His search for the unpredictable leads him to the edges of new territory, but it mostly makes you feel like the songs were cobbled together from multiple ideas, smoothed over enough not to feel jarring, yet still anticlimactic. “Losing Ground” builds to some kind of blast-off, crescendoing with noisy guitar and synth arpeggios, only to suddenly dissolve into a minute’s worth of railroad track sounds and ambient hums. Even the album’s closer, “Traces of Love,” misdirects in its final moment, building a bit of momentum with splatters of synth before appearing to move into a new section (or even a new song if you’re not paying attention to the tracklist) that lasts about fifteen seconds. It’s a random, albeit pretty, bit tacked onto the end, but it left me wondering if I was missing a hidden track or another thirty seconds of outro. I Wrote You A Letter’s self-nostalgia keeps it firmly operating in the same wheelhouse as essentially every other M83 record. Without room for progression, regression and quiescence are the only options. On one hand, as someone who adores the distorted digitalia of the first records, it’s nice to hear a bit of edge back in M83’s music, despite its artificiality. On the other hand, I can go back and listen to the self-titled LP or Dead Cities any time I want a fix. [Other Suns] aly eleanor is a writer and musician from Minneapolis. Her work has been featured in Pitchfork, Bandcamp, The Creative Independent, POW Mag, and more; she makes music as purity olympics. Follow her @purityolympics or email her.