Music

Q&A: MGMT revels in shapeshifting psychedelia

by Mark Teo

If there’s anything the duo known as MGMT—Benjamin Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden—have proven, it’s that they’re unpredictable. We first knew them as impressionistic hitmakers who, with their 2007’s Oracular Spectacular, penned legit earworms in “Kids” and “Time to Pretend.” They took a sharp left turn with Congratulations, a hit-free—but ultimately excellent—big-band foray into psychedelia. When news emerged that they were holed up with longtime producer Dave Fridmann prepping their third LP, we didn’t know what to expect.

MGMT, paradoxically their most stripped-down yet processed album yet, pushes their creative boundaries further still: It’s a dreamlike electronic statement, punctuated by the band’s penchant for altered-state musings on life, love, and death. It sounds exactly like MGMT and nothing like them at all, proof that, as Goldwasser tells us, comes from being a band where “people expect to not know what to expect.”

AUX: Before we talk MGMT, let’s talk Congratulations. Most thought it was huge departure for you, and some people were upset with how radical it was. Did you learn anything from the Congratulations era?

Ben Goldwasser: They feel very separate to me, because we did take a bit off time off touring for Congratulations. But we had a very different approach for both albums. With Congratulations, we were going for a sound that could be played on stage with a full live band. Our heads were spinning after the experience of the first record, and we were disoriented. It resulted in a certain kind of cynicism. For our new one, it was just the two of us, and the mood’s really different—a lot of it’s based on improvisation.

Speaking of your new album: How do you think people will receive MGMT?

Well, I don’t think people will be as shocked. We can now change our sound and shape.

Is popular music ready to embrace that much of a question mark, though?

Well, I think there are more out-there, or even psychedelic bands, accepted in popular music: Tame Impala, Ariel Pink, the Flaming Lips. So I’m feeling really positive about how people will act. I didn’t know what to expect from the “Life is a Lie” video [note: this interview occurred before the band announced their plans to cast Michael K. Williams as a drug, er, plant hunter for “Cool Song No. 2” ], but people really loved it. I’m excited for people to hear the deeper side of the album.

Curious that you mention the “deeper” aspect of the album—considering you seem to tackle heavy topics, like death and ending relationships, almost meditatively.

Well where we were recording, it was rural and country and pretty isolated. But we were in good moods, and while we were happy and things were moving well, we had dour moments when we were writing. Both the music and the lyrics came from trying to write in a way that’s more conscious—I’m not talking about drug use or altered states, but to a point where writing became automatic. Sometimes I’ll write lyrics then be surprised about where it comes from.

You and Andrew have mentioned that you thought your new stuff was less paranoid. Is that because you’re now free of that second-album pressure?

For sure. What’s weird, though, is that most of the pressure and stress and tension [from Congratulations] came after we recorded it. I don’t know if it was our naïveté, but we made something different and people were pissed off. We had trouble making sense of it. But there’s never been pressure from the label to make our songs go in any direction. So this time,  we made it a goal to take pressure off ourselves, and when we were writing songs, we allowed ideas a chance before we cut off the creativity.

Who are you specifically talking about on “Your Life is a Lie”? Is there a specific type of person you’re talking about on the song? Or is that subtle self-criticism?

It’s both—and it’s a lot of things. I think it’s everything from the conspiracy minded thought pattern, where everything can be a lie. If you go down that wormhole, people think that death is a fallacy, that you don’t have to eat, you can just stare at the sun forever. The most obvious thing, though, is [that] living as a human, everyone I know can have this feeling that they’re not really in control of their life. Others make the decisions that control the world. And that can be frustrating.

The lyrics on “Plenty of Girls” talk about “tending to the void,” but also seems to celebrate the joys of single life.

I guess maybe Ben was single when we wrote it, but I wasn’t. It’s weird, because that’s the one song that was written in a traditional sense, and we thought it was a funny joke. It’s not really based on personal experience, just things we picked up along the way. It’s slightly vaguely sexual advice but it’s also a triple entendre—we left a lot of space in our music.

You mentioned the influence of house music on your record. It’s not evident on first spin, but can you explain what you were listening to?

We were getting into trance and deep house—Detroit and Chicago stuff, and Frankie Harris, and early ‘90s electronic stuff: The Orb, Future Sound of London, and the Psychic TV stuff.