Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden of MGMT are not happy people. They do not make happy music, nor do they even claim to know what happiness is. But they do like to have a laugh. It’s a tension that has governed their output since the band’s inception in 2002. Now, as then, MGMT employs the “classic combination” of joyful music paired with “soul-crushing” lyrics. Songwriting alchemy as old as the musical note, it’s a tactic that has seen the duo through 20 years and five albums, including their most recent, ‘Loss of Life’, a project that argues we must “accept the end of something in order for something new to begin.” Andrew grins: “Like The Lion King.”
Ben, a little more reticent than his bandmate, sits with his laptop on his knee. Andrew, the more sardonic of the two, has positioned himself at a desk by an expensive-looking microphone in what is presumably his studio. Outside the window behind him is a barren and frozen tableau. The pair are almost 3,000 miles apart, Andrew “in the snowy woods outside the New York area” and Ben in California. Distant though they may be now, the two have come together again and again over the years, first as college mates and since as adult friends on opposite sides of the country. “Ben and I have known each other since we were 18 or 19, so more than half of our lives,” Andrew notes, “We’ve grown and changed a lot as people but I think our new album is proof that we have the same creative spark we had when we met. There’s some kind of alchemical magic that happens when we get together.”
The last time they met to make original music was six years ago for 2018’s ‘Little Dark Age’, their most commercially successful outing since their kaleidoscopic debut ‘Oracular Spectacular’ in 2007. And now? Another alchemical meeting of minds, the product of which is a fifth album: ‘Loss of Life’.
‘Loss of Life’ – LOL – a title that reveals both MGMT’s chronic millennialism and that primal urge to cross-breed tragedy and comedy. There is no clear line between optimist and pessimist in this partnership though. Not like in The Smiths, anyway (“I wonder if Johnny Marr was trying to cheer Morrissey up?”). Instead, the two members of MGMT wear each of the tragi-comedy masks simultaneously.
Ben, who calls himself a “bummed out person in general”, and Andrew, who finds the concept of happiness unknowable, are nevertheless always in the business of writing “something that makes us laugh”. In ‘Loss of Life’, melancholy and humour come together in a subtle waltz, darting from mournful Simon & Garfunkel tributes to ‘Oracular Spectacular’-esque euphoria via lyrics that confront both mortality and hope. This blend of emotion is not only a clever tactic, but something else, too: a way to prove that MGMT are not “completely up [their] own asses.”
“We haven’t gone fully soft,” Andrew deadpans, the bare trees outside his window, the golden light pouring in from Ben’s, offering a further visual aid to the pervasive dichotomy. “A lot of the themes on the new record — this very saccharine love conquers all [message] or the importance of friendship and bonds between people — we want to let people know there’s a tongue-in-cheek element to it”: songwriting may be “a way to process feelings of pain or anxiety” but it’s also a chance to make something that “feels like an inside joke”. A fine example of this comes in the form of ‘Bubblegum Dog’, a slacker rock track that’s been hit across the face with a synthesised sledgehammer. “It was something we had a lot of fun with,” Ben says, as proven by the soft toy available on the band’s site, “based on this really strange teddy bear designed by Philippe Starck”.
The concept of the ‘Bubblegum Dog’ has been in the ether for MGMT fans since a Periscope livestream in 2016 when the duo mentioned it as part of a list of songs they were working on. Contrary to some fans’ speculations, the song was real from the beginning. “It was legitimately a song that we started writing years ago,” Ben confirms, adding that fan mythologising made it larger in their minds: “It’s something we always wanted to finish, especially knowing at least a handful of people would be excited if it turned out to be an actual track.” In the works for several years, the mystery track had taken on an almost mythical life of its own, with fans regularly engaged in speculation. “The last rumour I saw before the track came out was about it being some epic, half-hour long multi-part song,” Ben chuckles. “I guess people took that at face value.”
A burlesque of the rock videos of the ‘90s – Smashing Pumpkins ‘Today’, Soundgarden’s ‘Black Hole Sun’, Pearl Jam’s ‘Jeremy’ – the ‘Bubblegum Dog’ visual exacerbates the role of the track as comedic centrepiece to ‘Loss of Life’. In the video, Ben and Andrew don wigs, fake goatees and Y2K grungecore to continually encounter and evade a guy in a German Shepherd mask. Unable to do one without the other, though, there’s still a sombre heart to the farce if you look deeper: “The idea for the video came from the idea of running from the past. The revelation at the end is if you just embrace the truth, whatever it is, then that’s the only way to find peace.”
It’s a sliver of wisdom that TikTokers have picked up, not from a new composition like this one, but via single ‘Time To Pretend’ from world-beating debut ‘Oracular Spectacular’, the latest MGMT song to go viral following its use by Emerald Fennell in Saltburn (“I wished the movie ended differently. I didn’t really understand why we were supposed to be rooting for this guy,” Andrew muses). The trend uses the song to soundtrack a shift in perspective, and has seen the single jump to almost a quarter-of-a-million uses on the platform. Andrew likes the trend so much that he doesn’t even mind the irony in a deeply cynical song being used for good: he finds the meme “a profound, zen psychedelic thing. They’re taking one thing and changing the colour. That’s kind of what the title of our album is dealing with. ‘Loss of Life’ sounds so dark and morbid but we don’t see it that way. We also see it as a spiritually profound realisation.”
Finding themselves part of trends like this fascinates them both. It’s happened before, when the title track from ‘Little Dark Age’ hit the big time on TikTok, with over 200k videos currently soundtracked by the song. “Every now and then we have to do something that’s accidentally on trend,” Ben, characteristically quiet in his wit, says as an aside.
Doubtless, MGMT will be “accidentally” on trend again soon, what with the daring complexities of their fifth album. Take opener ‘Loss of Life (part 2)’, a needle drop that uses the voice of an Oxford professor reading the words to the anonymous poem “I am Taliesin, I sing perfect metre” over toybox harpsichords and electronic flutes. Or ‘Dancing in Babylon’, which enlists Christine and the Queens in a beguiling and convincing pitch to bring back the duet.
Such interesting artists with such an unusual and daring discography. It’s hard to believe that any of their songs should appear on a compilation called ‘Now! That’s What I Call Dad Rock’, isn’t it? Particularly ‘Kids’, a song, ironically, about the foibles of Father Time. No surprises that MGMT take the news (for their appearance on the compilation is news to them) in good humour. “It’s more like dad rock in the sense that: this was made by old people. 40 is old if you’re 18,” Andrew says sagely, amused. “I just hope that people accept our new music as dad rock because it’s the closest we’ve ever gotten to it,” he adds. MGMT may not be made up of happy men or happy music, but they do both like to have a laugh. “If we failed at making dad rock it’d be really sad,” Ben says. They both giggle.
MGMT’s ‘Loss Of Life’ is out now