“Midnight City” by M83

"Midnight City" launched Hurry Up, We're Dreaming, the sixth album from French electronic band M83, in 2011, and it plays like a neon skyline set to music: a warped, chirping synth hook, a massive drum-machine thud and Anthony Gonzalez's distant, yearning vocal, all building to a saxophone blowout from James King that hits like dawn breaking over the freeway.

Gonzalez produced it with Justin Meldal-Johnsen, the two of them handling keyboards, drum machines and electric guitar, and wrote it with Meldal-Johnsen and Morgan Kibby. Tony Hoffer mixed it into something huge and glowing, vintage soundtrack romance filtered through a bedroom dreamer's sensibility.

It reached number eight in France and landed on Billboard's Alternative Songs and Rock Songs charts, then kept finding new lives on television. French network TF1 used it to close its coverage of the Euro 2012 football matches, sending it to the top of the French digital chart, and in the UK it became the theme to Made in Chelsea and a fixture of the BBC's coverage of the London 2012 Olympics.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.