A lot of great music exists out there. But NBN can’t devote a slot to every CD that hits shelves, especially for bands most of you have never heard of. So, that’s where we come in. Due to our indie leanings here at One-Click Wonders, we catch all the music too obscure for the main page, and offer up a quick take on it. Today, we play Marty McFly and travel back to the ’80s with M83.

Bombastic French electro artist M83 — a.k.a. Anthony Gonzalez and whoever he can find to help him on his latest album — knows how to wring emotion out of even the coldest musical sources. On 2003’s Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, the group twisted synths and drum machines into a giant sound evoking the beauty of nature, turning cheesy electronics into emotional grandeur. With 2005’s Before the Dawn Heals Us, M83 transformed teen angst and neon-lit dance music into something genuinely touching. Gonzalez’s latest, Saturdays=Youth, reconfigures the sounds and sentimentalities of the 1980’s - the high school-focused works of John Hughes just as much an influence on this album as Duran Duran - to create powerful songs drenched in teenage nostalgia.

Saturdays=Youth leans closer to Before the Dawn’s electro-angst, but those songs just recalled the ’80s; M83’s latest bunch of songs actually sound ripped straight from that decade. The tracks constantly remind of various ’80s outfits, from Kate Bush (the keyboards and drum machines) to Talk Talk (the waves of electronics) to, most clearly, Cocteau Twins (the way the synths and words compliment one another). “Kim & Jessie” boasts traces of all of the above, but infuses M83’s usual enormous sound into the mix to up the emotional results big time. Other tracks, like the glowing “We Own the Sky” and “Dark Moves of Love,” follow suit successfully, utilizing ’80s sounds in exciting new ways. Sometimes, the trick doesn’t work for too long, such as on the dragged-out “Skin of the Night,” but the album rarely lags, even on the eight-minute-plus burner “Couleurs,” the most Duran Duran-esque track and the group’s most danceable work yet.

The album’s cover art (a bunch of oddly-dressed teens with stoic looks painted on their faces) hints at Saturdays=Youth’s other major influence, high school-centric films loaded with emotional young adults. Behind the slow synth drone, “Kim & Jessie” conceals a sweet story about hidden love. The lyrics lack specific detail, like on the otherworldly prom-worthy “Up!,” but capture the grand feelings of teenagers, the starry-eyed tenderness and world-crushing depression young love brings with it. “Graveyard Girl” finds M83 creating their own Hughes-worthy character (the lyrics even directly reference Molly Ringwald), a cemetery-loving girl who is “the dirty witch of her high school” who “worships Satan like her father.” Moving along on the album’s most pop-like arrangement, “Graveyard Girl” overwhelms with teenage angst (including an extremely-emo spoken word passage), and is the album’s emotional standout.

If the recent “Rick Roll” phenomenon indicates anything, most people look back at ’80s music ironically, not seriously. Saturdays=Youth looks only longingly at that decade and its sounds, and M83 treats those noises with respect and admiration, milking every ounce of emotional power even the chessiest synth conceals. Saturdays=Youth bulges with nostalgia I’m not old enough to remember, but a sentiment anyone can connect with and would feel at home blasting out of that boombox at the end of Say Anything.

Bonus video of “Graveyard Girl”