The Singles Jukebox

But don’t like it.

[Video][Website]
[4.33]

Katherine St Asaph: I’d written M83’s music off as the most shameless(ly effective) of festival pathos, with more emotional jugular-seizing than Andrew Lloyd Webber and Zedd combined; here we have indie mumbling over ragtime piano and no hook. It isn’t long before M83 remember who the hell they are and what their listeners want, but that time in between is fascinating: M83 sounding like nothing else.
[7]

Iain Mew: It makes me think of Camel gone house, but in about the most superficial way possible. Rather than M83 deploying all these luxe prog touches acting as an affectionate reminder, the clumsy way they blast on through them does them a disservice.
[3]

Cassy Gress: Anthony Gonzalez, do it! Try it! Resolve that goddamn iv-Vsus4-V into a i! You’re killing me here. This is full of chord progressions that stubbornly don’t go the way my ears want them to, and with the “do it! try it!” poking and prodding at me, and that bizarre tack piano at the beginning, this almost feels like a troll.
[4]

Scott Mildenhall: It begins with house piano by way of music hall Wurlitzer, and by its climax has accelerated into a full-on ecstatic carousel, lights strobing as the horses break free of their poles and take flight. What could have been inconsequentially wacky is instead a dizzy joy. It’s 2007, 1987 and 1927 all at once, and that’s surely nothing short of the sound of the future.
[7]

Micha Cavaseno: I truly don’t get it, I thought we all agreed that the whole Unicorn Kid era was a mistake?
[2]

Patrick St. Michel: Everyone gets old, and most of them get cranky about something. The last few years have seen electronic artists once at the forefront of the style whining about the kids today — most notably, Daft Punk’s insistence that computers aren’t instruments, mannnn — and now M83 joins in. ‘”I feel like we’re losing this culture of making things, everything is digital, even in music,” he says. His response, then, is “Do It, Try It,” a meandering bit of electro squawk full of pitch-shifted vocals and retro-tinged synthesizer — things that no shortage of other artists making music in digital spaces have also played around with for, oh, the last ten years and come up with far more enjoyable songs. This is either a piss take (annoying) or a total whiff at electro-pop experimentation (more likely, just as annoying). At least Daft Punk made songs that sounded good on the radio.
[0]

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: Maybe we’ve all got so familiar with M83’s previous masterpiece Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming — and its monumental musical gestures — that some have found “Do It, Try it” just completely unlistenable. It may have taken us all by surprise, but this is a classic Anthony Gonzalez move. M83 has always been (and should remain) a project in constant reinvention. This messy, delirious piano-house number is all about fun for fun’s sake, but it’s also about nihilistic abandon. After all, Gonzalez himself, on a press release for upcoming LP Junk, said: “Anything we create today is going to end up being space junk at one point anyway.” There’s no better way to sum this up. 
[6]

Alfred Soto: Echo, broken-distorted vocal hook, each expected hesitation over house piano pounding — M83 has graduated to the dance festival circuit, all right, as if a college kid dreamed their miserabilist beginnings. Can’t deny the synth bass or the quasi-classical flourishes before that meaningless hook though.
[5]

Danilo Bortoli: M83 have already hinted at synth-pop pastiche before and the result was one of the pivotal albums of the aughts, a coming of age tale that still resonates. In “Do It, Try It”, they sound self-referential and constrained — as if the eighties could be limited to The Human League’s Dare and nothing else. They “evoke”, they “trigger” a very specific time’s music, which is something they have done extensively with guts and confidence in the past. But sometimes, along the way, they were able to get away with it with much more wit than now.
[5]