Content:
MGMT navigate positivity, partnerships, and the idea that love conquers all with their new album, ‘Loss Of Life’.
Words: Finlay Holden.
Photos: Jonah Freeman.
Dipping in and out of the mainstream zeitgeist at a whim, US psych-pop duo MGMT have long been challenging to pin down. With their fifth album, ‘Loss of Life’, Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser are outrunning their shadows to push forward a message of optimism and open-mindedness.
MGMT’s last full-length effort, ‘Little Dark Age’, saw a resurgence in popularity for the group, with the widespread title track becoming the soundtrack to social activism within online platforms and racking up streams to match the status of their iconic debut record. However, far from capitalising on this unintended success, Andrew and Ben simply watched it unfold from the sidelines.
No longer the ambitious but satirical stage performers they were when they met in college 20 years ago, the pair have found freedom in the more unseen parts of the craft. “There has been a flipping over the course of our long friendship and career as a band,” Andrew observes. “As we’ve progressed over the years, we’ve gotten more comfortable being in the studio, making sounds and recording. Last time we were touring, I loved it, and we had a lot of great times, but I don’t really talk a lot on the mic. I can say for myself, I don’t feel like an entertainer anymore.”
“Our roots are mostly in 80s pop music”
Andrew VanWyngarden
Instead of putting on a front for crowds, the guys put more emphasis on entertaining themselves and their friends, something that sits at the core of their formation. “Part of the ethos of the band early on was this tongue-in-cheek thing; we were playing in people’s living rooms but acting like rock stars,” he recalls. “That was the whole gimmick. Flash forward to 5 years later when we’re signed to a major label, we still had this urge to do this thing, but suddenly, we’re on David Letterman and playing Coachella. We quickly had to reconfigure ourselves.”
“It was peak irony in terms of popular culture at that point in time, too,” Ben chips in. “There was a little internal backlash; we don’t want to be ironic when everything is about being ironic. Things soon got a bit more legit than what we’d been doing before. We wanted to challenge ourselves by taking it seriously.”
Since then, they have challenged themselves and their listeners through years of dynamic, captivating and exploratory releases such as 2010’s surf-fuelled ‘Congratulations’ and their declarative self-titled LP in 2013. A consensus seemingly arose that MGMT were rejecting their success and popularity, but that wasn’t quite the truth. If anything, they were simply trying to make songs and leave the pretences behind.
“We’re excited by experimentation and not doing the same things over and over; we’ve always been like that, even from the early projects we did. We want there to be a slightly challenging element to our music and performance, although our roots are mostly in 80s pop music,” Andrew states. “When you have an outside perspective, it’s easy to construct a narrative, but when you’re in it and you’re the artist? We were just doing whatever we felt we should do in each moment. Pretty much every album only came together properly after we did something that made us crack up and fall to the floor laughing. That’s the root of our friendship and the basis of our music.”
Removing themselves from those conversations and keeping on going in their own lane, their noisy and chaotic approach once again aligned with the mainstream – only for MGMT to abandon the world of major labels and step out alone for the very first time. However, with multiple producers, writers, instrumentalists and musicians featured, the duo were not isolated but instead unrestrained. As Andrew explains, “Even if it’s not the classic evil label trope, you still have another level of approval hanging over you. It just makes you think about things that aren’t even related to the music. We didn’t have that at all here; it felt way more liberating and allowed us to be more open to collaborating – it felt natural to do that.”
“That’s never really happened for us in our whole career,” Ben says of shopping around an LP they had pieced together themselves with infinite opportunity and no constraints. “It was as exciting as challenging, but we’re in a much better place to be able to do only the things that we want in order to promote this record. That is a luxury.”
“We wanted to come from a place of friendship and getting inspired and excited together”
Ben Goldwasser
With the solid grounding of long-time collaborator Dave Fridmann and ‘Little Dark Age’ producer Patrick Wimberly, familiar footing allowed these multi-instrumentalists to wander into new spaces with ease, seeking fresh partnerships to ride forward with. The most obvious of those is Christine and the Queens’ Redcar, who joins the world of ‘Loss of Life’ for MGMT’s first-ever feature track.
“When this song was still taking shape, there was a moment where it became more of a duet,” Andrew shares. “His incredible voice was something that immediately came to be a fit for the song. It happened really easily and quickly; it’s a great creative partnership that we’ve started. When you hear someone who can sing sing, it’s like, oh shit, that’s different.”
The first track from this album to come out the gate, though, was ‘Mother Nature’, which quickly transported the band from their previous hypercritical era into a surprisingly happy vibe. “Not to sound super pretentious, but we feel like the world needs some more positive, uplifting, non-cynical messages out here,” the frontman smiles. “It was a conscious choice thematically that we wanted this album to be positive in contrast to the title, which sounds like we’re going into a goth-metal album. Actually, I think it’s the most sincere and positive album that we’ve made, and also least self-conscious by far.”
Part of that positivity was enabled by simply stepping away from music for a bit, compartmentalising that section of their lives away from the domestic reality. “Not having active conversations about what we were planning next and focusing more on our home lives, mental health, and stability meant that when coming back to this, it was pretty clear to both of us that we only wanted to come from a place of friendship and getting inspired and excited together,” Ben divulges. “It felt like a lot of the heavy stuff washed away. Any tension in our relationship, which sometimes comes with touring, was easier to let go of.”
After 20 years of companionship, the chemistry and cooperation at the core of MGMT burns as bright as ever. “We’ve steered clear of cocaine habits and split everything 50/50,” Andrew remarks. “It’s always been extremely mutual; we’re doing this together no matter what. We’ve managed to stay close friends and have a great creative relationship, which I think is rare for a longstanding duo – I’m looking at Hall & Oates right now.”
Recent single ‘Bubblegum Dog’ shows the pair’s vision of what happens when you do let spite snowball for too long. “While being in a goofy song with a silly title, the lyrics deal with this feeling of not being able to run away from things,” he begins. “It’s sort of a psychedelic notion too. When you’re on psychedelics, you’re confronted with everything; there’s nowhere to run, and you can’t escape. This song is about feelings of shame from your past, things you did that you cringe about now. The Bubblegum Dog is this force of reckoning that you cannot escape; it will always catch up to you somehow.”
“We’re these super ironic guys that grew up loving Beavis & Butthead, and now we’re 40 years old and wanting to make music that benefits the world in some way”
Andrew VanWyngarden
Whether in fear of this self-created entity or for more holistic reasons, MGMT have brought a new ethos into their multi-faceted world once again. Despite juxtaposing this search for joy with layers of cutting irony, Andrew and Ben are coming from a genuine place.
“It’s difficult to believe that love conquers all and talk about it in a way that doesn’t make you seem like a weirdo religious fundamentalist person, but I believe it,” Andrew admits. “We had fun dealing with that theme through these songs and trying to do it in an MGMT way. We are truly wrestling with sincerity; we’re these super ironic guys that grew up loving Beavis & Butthead, and now we’re 40 years old and wanting to make music that benefits the world in some way.”
Fans have been benefitting from the band’s output for a long time already, and that’s not something that goes unappreciated. “We’ve watched other musicians get to points in their career where they’re on some plateau looking back with some bitterness of something they thought they might have at that point, or something they used to have but don’t anymore,” Ben notes. “I feel grateful to be in a position where we’re not thinking about any of that. We are the freest that we’ve ever been from it all, and it feels a lot easier to come at music from a pure headspace.”
‘Loss of Life’ is a record that touches on the darker sides of human existence but never forgets the value of positivity. As Andrew concludes, “At any given moment, there are a million of the most terrible, awful things happening in the world, and that’s never going to change. Knowing that there is a constant of love that can’t ever be touched – playing with that became our muse.”
Taken from the February 2024 issue of Dork. MGMT’s album ‘Loss Of Life’ is out 23rd February.
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