Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	70/100
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
The A.V. Club	A
Drowned in Sound	7/10
The Guardian
musicOMH
Now	3/5
Pitchfork Media	8.5/10
PopMatters	6/10
Slant Magazine
Spin	5/10

Saturdays = Youth is the fifth studio album by French electronic band M83, first released on 11 April 2008. The album was produced by Ken Thomas, known for his work with Sigur Rós, The Sugarcubes, Cocteau Twins, and Suede, with co-production by Ewan Pearson (who has also produced for Tracey Thorn, The Rapture, and Ladytron) and M83 leader Anthony Gonzalez.

The album yielded four singles: "Couleurs" in February 2008, "Graveyard Girl" in April, "Kim & Jessie" in July and "We Own the Sky" in December. "Kim & Jessie" was placed at number 256 on Pitchfork Media's list of The Top 500 Tracks of the 2000s in August 2009.

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 that Saturdays=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." 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." He also opined that "though analog synthesizer remains definitional of the M83's sound, they open the arrangements to include more naturalistic instrumentation as well. The approach allows this band named for a galaxy to seem more grounded, and yet more universal, than ever before." Brian Howe of Pitchfork Media noted that Saturdays=Youth's songs "disperse in all directions: Producers Ewan Pearson and Ken Thomas spread the melodies and beats into a sound world of uncommon vibrancy and pristine clarity, mounted on a massive yet now more proportionate scale", adding that the album "meaningfully diversifies M83's catalog while retaining Gonzalez's indelible fingerprint."Drowned in Sound's Alex Denney commented that "Gonzales has taken a dive head-first into the lexicon of '80s pop culture and emerged with a clutch of winning tracks that borrow openly from any number of pin-ups of the era and glaze them in his breathy, expansive shoegaze sound his to generally winning effect." He continued, "Predictably there's a slide towards more abstracted material toward the latter half, and parts of Saturdays=Youth are all hairspray and no body, but the whole thing sweeps along with such an irrepressible mix of youthful invincibility [...] and flouncing fatalism [...] it sucks the wind right out of your cheeks before you've had chance to huff."Allmusic reviewer Heather Phares gave the album four out of five stars and concluded, "As super-stylized as its sounds and emotions are, Saturdays=Youth always seems genuine, even when it feels like its songs are made from the memories of other songs. For all of its nostalgic haze, it's some of M83's most focused music."

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