m83

The band's musical aesthetic is characterized by extensive use of reverb effects and lyrics spoken softly over loud instruments. Gonzalez has been inspired by aspects of the American Dream and his songs have been outlined as themed around "adult-scripted teen dreams".[7] Inspiration for the 1980s style found in much of Gonzalez’s music includes bands such as My Bloody Valentine, Pink Floyd, and Tangerine Dream. Between various electronic music properties and album artwork, M83’s style indicates a mix of both contemporary pop and 1980s dream pop.

Saturdays = Youth was met with positive reviews from most music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 70, based on 29 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

Andy Battaglia wrote for The A.V. Club thatSaturdays=Youth "boasts a more expansive sense of space" than the band's previous albums, and that it "serves in terms of songs as much as sound design: For all the awe kindled by the effectively perfect sound in a transcendent highlight like 'Kim & Jessie,' the real triumph is that M83 uses such a setting for more simple melody and emotion than ever before."[4] Dave Hughes of Slant Magazine gave the album four out of five stars, stating that "[a]lthough many songs still build toward walls of synth that flirt with white noise, the trademark crescendos are both leavened and deepened by being recast as textural objects and woven into lyrical pop songs.