MGMT blew up big on the back of their 2008 debut Oracular Spectacular, an album powered to success by expansive electro-pop anthems Kids, Time To Pretend and Electric Feel. But even by the time the record came out, US duo Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser had already moved on from that sound and into something a little more lo-fi and out-there. And their second record Congratulations, released in 2010, was definitely out there, ditching the day-glo singalongs in favour of jangly, psychedelic rock and proggy experimentalism. It’s very good but a lot of people at the time were not happy that MGMT no longer sounded like the MGMT they wanted. They’d been tricked!
Earlier this year, the pair told this writer in an interview for The New Cue about dealing with the fallout of not writing Kids Part Two. “It’s funny, because I think the portrait of it at the time was that it was a reactionary record on our part, that we were railing against the reception that our first record got or something,” said Goldwasser. “For us, it's strange, because Oracular Spectacular was a moment in time for the band when we'd already existed for a while. It was the first time anybody heard about us but we'd been messing around with different styles of music and changing things up for years. So Congratulations for us was just doing the same thing we'd always been doing but we had more resources to do it and could actually take our time and properly record an album with lots of instruments and lean into that.”
VanWyngarden agreed. “Oddly, the reactionary part of it, the part that required a lot of mental gymnastics and also just was naively unexpected on our end came after we had finished that and released the album. We went into the album just so excited and so juiced up from 2008. We were like, 'Now we're gonna do this this amazing thing where we rent a house and we get all these vintage instruments and we get Sonic Boom and Jennifer Herrema, why not? Let's do all this stuff.’ It was a really exuberant, psychedelic experience to record it and then we release it and people are like, ‘These guys are trying to destroy their success!’. And we're like, ‘What? No, we're just trying to make like a psychedelic album!'. So then we had to be like, 'oh, are we destroying our success?!’. That's what kind of tripped us up I think.
The singer said he could see where some fans might be coming from, though. “I understand that if you are a fan of a band and they make a song like Kids, which is just an electro pop banger, and then they come up with a song that sounds like Deep Freeze Mice, you're gonna be like 'fuck you!', but we weren't thinking about it like that. [pause] Maybe we were a little bit. [bigger pause] I mean, to be honest, we probably enjoyed the fact that people got upset by it.”
The pair comically recalled a show at the height of their buzz when the gigs were packed out with fans ready to party along to giddy anthems and received something else entirely. “Pople just wanted to come to our concerts and see, like, Daft Punk or something, like, ‘This is gonna be an electro banger concert!” VanWyngarden remembered. “And then we were so fried and so exhausted and partying too much and we had a really long hair and we would do a 15-minute version of Jesus And Mary Chain’s Teenage Lust. We were really, really into it and I just enjoy thinking about all of the disappointed people in the crowd, just being like, ‘Oh no, what is this?!’.”
Congratulations is great but here, for old time’s sake, is one of their bangers:
