MGMT are all grown up: ‘This sounds whack to say, but drugs are bad’

Sign up to Roisin O’Connor’s free weekly publication Now Hear This for the within observe on all issues music

Get our Now Hear This e-mail at no cost

The allure of Saltburn strikes once more. After Sophie Ellis-Bextor discovered herself reborn as a world darling within the wake of Barry Keoghan giving his undercarriage a flamboyant airing to “Murder on the Dancefloor”, it’s now MGMT’s flip to reap the Salt-sync rewards.

“[Debut single] ‘Time to Pretend’ was used in that movie and somehow from that it turned into a TikTok trend,” says multi-instrumentalist Ben Goldwasser, clutching a white-flecked beard down Zoom, nonetheless bemused by on-line occasions. “I think that’s maybe our top streaming song at this point… It’s pretty wild.”

It’s not the Connecticut (through NYC) psych-pop band’s first TikTok rodeo. Out of nowhere in 2020 Goldwasser and bandmate Andrew VanWyngarden – the uncompromising duo behind the Noughties’ most cosmic dancefloor hits “Time to Pretend”, “Electric Feel” and “Kids” – unexpectedly racked up 600 million streams of their 2018 electro-noir observe “Little Dark Age” after it was adopted as a trending sound on the platform.

Overnight it appeared these psych-pop Becks, who had seemingly fallen off the radar and right into a fathomless black gap of sonic weirdness for the previous decade, have been granted a brand new lease of life. “It just feels like a continuation of the absurdity of our existence as a band,” Goldwasser says, “We’re just doing our thing and these things just kept coming to us. Now it’s like lightning just struck twice.”

“They’re like blessings from the Lord,” VanWyngarden laughs. “At times we’ve actively tried to find ways to break away from these three songs that we wrote when we were in college. It seems like we confused people by not trying to recreate those songs, ever.”

Predictable, MGMT’s profession shouldn’t be. When these Wesleyan University associates and Talking Heads/OMD/noise rock followers first emerged with their 2007 debut album Oracular Spectacular, they have been the right trendy psych proposition. Pictured on the sleeve as Twenty fifth-century tribal hippies, they captured the last decade’s finish with their hallucinatory hook strains and warped, intoxicating pop sonics akin to a pan-dimensional Klaxons.

With the world their oyster, although, they determined to acid-fry it. Their 2010 second album Congratulations reached No 2 within the US and is now thought-about one thing of a basic itself, but its scarcity of infectious singles and its prolonged, uncompromising ventures into psych prog alienated followers of Oracular Spectacular’s kaleidoscopic synth-pop. 2013’s MGMT went even additional on the market – and failed to make the UK Top 40.

Little Dark Age noticed MGMT return to extra concise and melodic songwriting – and demanding favour. New album Loss of Life continues that development. “In some ways, it’s funny for us,” Goldwasser says, “because our approach to making music, in a lot of ways, has remained the same. We don’t necessarily set out from the beginning to be like, ‘We’re going to make an experimental record and now we’re not’ or ‘we’re going to make a pop hit now.’ We just get together and do whatever comes out.”

Loss of Life remains to be considerably weirder and wonkier than your common alt-rock album. In Saltburn phrases, it has drunk deep from Wayne Coyne’s bathwater. There are bubbletronic noises, hallucinogenic house burbles, Beach Boys orchestrations, ghost trains rumbling previous, and distorted poetry about liver and ale. “Bubblegum Dog”, a music about Nietzschean metaphors for inside anguish, sounds like David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” backed by a choir of android pooches. But the album’s madcap mentality is underpinned with accessible evocations of Velvets acid-folk, glam rock and synthpop. Take “Dancing in Babylon”. An amalgam of hypnagogic psychedelia and US drivetime radio rock, it resembles a cross between Tame Impala and Chicago. Goldwasser helpfully describes it as “like a cubist version of an Eighties power ballad. It’s fun to play with that stuff, to mix it up and jumble it together in different ways.”

Enjoy limitless entry to 70 million ad-free songs and podcasts with Amazon Music

Sign up now for a 30-day free trial

Sign up

Enjoy limitless entry to 70 million ad-free songs and podcasts with Amazon Music

Sign up now for a 30-day free trial

Sign up

Though its title suggests a grief-stricken assortment, the album strikes an obtuse notice halfway between love and loss. The title observe actually confronts loss of life and mortality, but VanWyngarden has imbued the album with private moments of safety and luxury. “Phradie’s Song”, just like the two-year-old daughter for whom he wrote the melody, is known as after his great-great-aunt Phradie Wells, a famed opera singer of the Nineteen Twenties who gave it all up for the small-town schoolteacher life. “What I experienced when I became a father was a forced transition and forced adjustment into a new universe,” VanWyngarden says, venturing right into a hippie-speak in tune along with his music. “A new reality where I had to accept – and sort of mourn in a way – the loss of a few past selves in order to really give everything to this new being and feel what I think is a direct link to the purest love in the universe.”

A music corresponding to “Nothing to Declare” appears to come from a spot of emotional vacancy and stagnation but is rooted in heat. Its protagonist is in a safe relationship, but nonetheless goes giant every so often. “They’re going out by themselves or smoking DMT and going on a deep journey or whatever,” VanWyngarden explains, clarifying that he doesn’t social gathering that a lot today himself. “Then you get home and you’re still swirling and tripping but you’re back in your home with your partner in this nest and there’s a newfound appreciation for coming back to it.”

Meanwhile first single “Mother Nature” is sort of a sequel to “Time to Pretend”, by which the now fortysomething MGMT are struggling to “keep our balance over zero” and “holding onto love like a stone”. “That is telling the story of us,” VanWyngarden admits. “I’m always at some point trying to pull Ben back in and get him back on our journey because I know that we both believe in the music, but sometimes Ben really wants to drift off… Sometimes I feel guilt about bringing Ben into this world.”

Memorably, “Time to Pretend” was one thing of a self-fulfilling mockery. It pastiched the live-fast-die-young life-style of the younger aspiring rock star, excessive on exhausting drugs and marrying a succession of disposable supermodels – a life the band embraced wholeheartedly: VanWyngarden dated fashions Camille Rowe and Andreea Diaconu and claimed their 2010 music “It’s Working” could possibly be summarised as “Yeah, we went out there and we did a lot of drugs, and it’s not that great.” Now, on “I Wish I Was Joking”, he sings “drugs will sink your mind and steal your friends”.

Was that their expertise? “In a lot of ways, yes,” Goldwasser admits. “Alcohol and drugs can be incredibly destructive,” says VanWyngarden. “They dramatically and permanently change people and their personalities. We’ve lost loved ones to drugs and alcohol and so that song is saying, ‘Yes, we’re a band that has been associated with psychedelic drugs and indie sleaze, we were roped into this world and now here we are telling it like it is, saying, ‘I know this sounds really whack to say, but drugs are bad.’”

Goldwasser turns modest. “We definitely enjoyed ourselves on the road and there was a certain amount of, ‘How long is this going to last? We might as well enjoy it while we can,’ but it’s not very sustainable,” he says. “Now that we’re in our forties, it’s not a very good look.”

The title of Little Dark Age, and far of that file, referenced the band’s considerations about Donald Trump’s first presidential time period. Joe Biden, nonetheless, hasn’t introduced Goldwasser any sense of reduction. “Nothing bad about Biden,” he says, “but I feel like there’s been this dark cloud hanging over everything, regardless of who’s sitting in the chair. It feels like the very dark undercurrents that have been bubbling up in our country – and everywhere, pretty much – still feel very present and unresolved.”

When I recommend that 2024 may even see America’s final significant vote of his lifetime, Goldwasser seems resigned: “There are definitely countries where that has happened.” VanWyngarden likens the state of America to Mike Judge’s 2006 comedy movie Idiocracy, a few dystopian future by which humanity has been dumbed down by know-how. “There’s a lot of denial here right now about just how truly dangerous our situation is,” he says. “Trump has, like, a blueprint now for how he’s going to dismantle and restructure the US government if he becomes president. That’s not getting enough attention, really. People were focusing a lot on both candidates being senile.” He shakes his head. “It makes me want to run away to France.”

Despite feeling the profound advantages of TikTok, MGMT are equally dismayed on the necessities of streaming success, too. “It’s almost a joke how it’s the antithesis of what you did when you put out music in the Nineties,” says VanWyngarden. “Now it’s like, if you’re not whoring yourself out and selling your soul as much as possible, then you’re weird and something’s wrong with you. Now there’s this monster, huge app, Spotify, that pays artists a 1,000th of a penny per stream if they’re lucky and they’re telling you that the only way to really get your music out there is to promote this platform for free, make all this free advertising for our platforms and also do everything about your brand and your image. It’s really strange. I don’t like it.”

Not a band to court docket mainstream consideration, relentlessly promote themselves or play by any billionaire’s guidelines, MGMT haven’t booked a single present to capitalise on their revived fortunes. They additionally just lately left Columbia to launch their music independently.

“This is sort of an experiment for us,” says VanWyngarden. “We’ve made four albums, and it was always: put our blood, sweat and tears into an album and then grind away on the road, really deplete ourselves, enter a new trough of comedown and second guessing and disillusionment, and then that’s where the next phase of creation starts. What we’re trying to do now is ride on the high of releasing something that we’re proud of, and we feel like it’s been generally a very positive response. And now we’re going to go make more music and not grind away on the road.”

Don’t put a full-on cultural comeback previous them, although. Life, as a sensible dude as soon as sang, can all the time begin up anew.

The single and video for ‘People in the Streets’ will probably be out later this month