M83 performs at Fox Theater in Oakland on May 16, 2023. Chloe Catajan/STAFF.

OAKLAND — There are many artists in search of the next big hit. But Anthony Gonzalez has been avoiding his for years. And at the first of two nights at the Fox Theater on Tuesday, his band M83 focused not on his hits but mostly on new songs and deeper cuts from older albums. Sure, “Midnight City” made an appearance in the encore, but it wasn’t the focus.

The show was the penultimate stop on the first leg of M83’s tour supporting new album Fantasy. And most of those songs—10 in all—were played. The band opened with five straight new tunes: Soothing and bassy instrumental “Water Deep,” call to action “Ocean’s Niagara,” uptempo pop song “Amnesia” (a full-on banger in concert), psychedelic-like jam “Earth to Sea” and “Us and the Rest.”

M83 performs at Fox Theater in Oakland on May 16, 2023.

For most of the time, the band—including  keyboardist Kaela Sinclair, multi-instrumentalist Joe Berry, guitarist Théophile Antolinos, drummer Julien Aoufi and bassist/violinist Clément Libes—was hidden in shadows, lit up in short bursts from time to time. That took the focus away from the people on stage and shifted it to the production, which, without overdoing it, cleverly used lighting to project three-dimensional-looking shapes and geometrical patterns. During “Wait,” one of the deeper cuts from 2011’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, it looked like palm fronds or Venus fly traps were reaching out from the stage.

M83 played in front of a latticework of LED lights that resembled jagged mountain peaks. When it was lit up in emerald green during the first song, with a video of two blinking eyes overhead, it resembled the cover of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.”

Most of the songs were blanketed in gauzy synths and guitar lines. The intros, outros or both had dramatic crescendos. The band built up “Run Into Flowers,” from 2003’s Dead Cities, Red Skies & Lost Ghosts, in washes of sounds before the song exploded in a cacophony, with strobe lights adding to the effect. “Noise,” from the same album, became a deafening roar, with the musicians emphatically swaying to the beat, as if themselves in a trance.

M83 performs at Fox Theater in Oakland on May 16, 2023.

Other than thanking the audience, his band and his crew, Gonzalez didn’t talk over the roughly 90-minute performance. But he communicated plenty well with his bandmates, duetting with Sinclair on Fantasy tune “Laura.” It was she who sang lead on “Solitude,” the only song from performed from 2016’s Junk, as Libes added an emotional violin part.

The pace began to pick up in the last third of the show, which included new tune “Sunny Boy,” one of the poppiest on Fantasy. And after songs like “Wait” and “Dismemberment Bureau” (another new one), which both provided a breather from the bombast, M83 delivered show highlight “My Tears Are Becoming a Sea,” (from Hurry Up), which is still blowing people away.

The band began the encore with “Midnight City,” but that seemed more like a formality before M83 got to “Mirror,” that album’s bonus track and a banger in the vein of LCD Soundsystem. By this point, Gonzalez was on his knees, undulating as he worked knobs on a pedal board to manipulate the sound.

Electronic composer (and graphic artist and college professor) Jeremiah Chiu opened the show seated at a synth, churning out cascading soundscapes that went back and forth between organic (whooshing wind, crashing waves, warm brass) and highly synthetic (bleeps, bloops and dialup-modem-like sounds). He was able to get through about four or five songs in his 30-minute set.

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter. Follow Chloe Catajan at Instagram.com/riannachloe.