they have a secret world

I think the brilliant thing about M83's Saturdays = Youth is how it imagines teenagehood specifically as some amazingly poetic and romantic and idyllic time when in fact it never was. We live our relationship to our young selves through nothing other than the dioramae of nostalgic popular culture such as this, which sets a scene (full of sultry night air, violent romance and meaning, so much meaning) that never really existed. The album itself never quite gets to this youth it so insistently turns upon, the space it is looking for which is also a time, and that itself is profoundly melancholic and beautiful. I listen to You, Appearing and the rest of it all with bad teenage poetry lyrics and heavy solipsism and I just marvel at the time, the beauty, that becomes mist (and it certainly does after a few listens, losing all of its evocative force when you realise the rickety structure it is built upon - but you still have that initial moment, the youth of this album, which you remember as an idyllic time, and you find yourself looking for it, and on).