Pitchfork

"There is no irony at all in my musical relation to the 80s," M83's Anthony Gonzalez told Pitchfork's Matthew Solarski recently. "So yeah, I really can cry when I listen to a Kate Bush song or Simple Minds." For "Graveyard Girl", the first single from M83's forthcoming Saturdays = Youth, Gonzalez moves from the shoegaze-y electronic swirls of Before the Dawn Heals Us and Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts to new-wave pastiche and the all-consuming teenage melodrama of John Hughes. When the guitars surge into the song's glistening synth pastures, joining some anthemic drums to hold Gonzalez's whispery vocal aloft like a lighter, the butterflies all come rushing back. Being a teenager is intense, man.

The video for the song carries the John Hughes parallel further, letting us get to know the potential teen-movie characters shown on the new album's cover. In the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions, the "Graveyard Girl" clip is about a goth. Like Belle & Sebastian's "Sukie in the Graveyard", she likes to visit the cemetery, but she also has an unbearably enormous crush on a jock. It's the kind of all-consuming and, yes, adolescent emotion you can only feel at a certain age-- and which "Graveyard Girl" achieves through a mix of nostalgia and modernity exemplified by the album's co-producers, Ewan Pearson and Ken Thomas. "I'm 15 years old and I feel it's already too late to live," says guest vocalist Morgan Kibby of Los Angeles-based band the Romanovs, in a mid-song monologue. "Don't you?"

Video:> M83: "Graveyard Girl"
[from Saturdays = Youth; due 04/15/08 on Mute]