Gonzalez and his co-producer of the last half decade, veteran session and touring instrumentalist Justin Meldal-Johnsen, are sitting across from one another in a studio at Swing House Recordings, a massive, anonymous concrete building tucked into the residential L.A. neighborhood of Atwater Village. Gonzalez, who is deceptively unassuming until he gets going on a favorite topic, is on the couch; Meldal-Johnsen, whose wiry jolt of brown hair stands six inches above his scalp, giving him the air of a perpetually hassled mad scientist, leans forward in an office chair. One lumpy candle flickers meekly on a coffee table, which reveals stacks of Tape Op and vintage Playboy magazines underneath its glass surface. It’s not even 10 a.m., but purple mood lights illuminate soundproofed walls stacked halfway to the ceiling with amps and synthesizers plucked from the past 40 years. On a monitor off to one side of the mixing board, scenes from Fritz Lang’s classic dystopian film Metropolis play out on mute.

The duo, along with the help of a few carefully selected collaborators, have spent the last year and change in this den (and a few others) preparing M83’s seventh record in the only way Gonzalez believes a musician can in this era: “By looking behind and seeing what influenced us when we were kids and trying to make that our own.” But while Hurry Up was born out of the musician's move from France to L.A. and all the bright and ecstatic feelings that came with that six-thousand-mile relocation, at this point, the California shine has worn off.

Gonzalez parlayed his breakthrough to score a gig soundtracking the 2013 Tom Cruise modern action film Oblivion, though he has said the experience—making music to please everyone else before himself, being told his ideas were “too indie”—left him “on the verge of breaking down.” He had more autonomy working on his brother Yann’s art-house orgy You and the Night a year later, but an extended absence from his home country started to turn his attentions inward. After years of building the most extravagant, hyper-ambitious sonic landscapes he could think of, Gonzalez wanted to shift gears with the new M83 record, to crank down his epic visions into “something more crazy and fun—an organized mess.”

He’s calling it Junk.

He says the album title in such a deadpan that he's impelled to confirm its seriousness. (Not that he's really one for making jokes, anyway.) “It’s a statement,” he explains. “This is how people listen to music nowadays: They’re just gonna pick certain songs they like—one, two, if you’re lucky—and trash the rest. All else becomes junk.”

“We think about it in terms of all the space junk orbiting the planet,” Meldal-Johnsen adds.

At this point, Gonzalez can't help but blow-up the self-consciously small title, turning its meaning into an omen for the apocalypse. “I believe we’re gonna [destroy] ourselves very soon," he says with a shrug. "We’ll all have the same fate.” In other words: Once we all become space detritus, what's the difference between a masterpiece and some beautiful junk?