How MGMT Became My Favorite Band in 2024 (Part One)
If I’ve talked with you about music sometime over the last six months, I have probably brought up MGMT. If I haven’t, it’s because I was feeling too self-conscious about the depths of my obsession with the band. Over the summer I revisited MGMT after hearing some songs off of Oracular Spectacular. This led me back to songs like “Kids” and “Time to Pretend,” which I found still hold up very well. This phase turned into obsession in October when I listened to their second album, Congratulations, and it finally clicked. Like reallyyyyy clicked.
Most people are familiar with MGMT from their trio of massive hits that dominated the late aughts: “Kids,” “Time to Pretend,” and “Electric Feel.” The band largely faded from the limelight as they stepped away from the electro-pop style of those singles and into a more idiosyncratic psychedelic sound. Their second and third albums, Congratulations and MGMT, failed to deliver the same commercial success that the band saw with the Big Three singles, but started to earn them a smaller, more devoted fanbase. Over the past few years, MGMT once again found massive success with their fourth album, 2018’s Little Dark Age. During the pandemic, two tracks from this record went viral on TikTok, “Little Dark Age” and “When You Die.” Despite only being out for six years, “Little Dark Age” has already surpassed “Time to Pretend” (a song that is 17 years old) in streams on Spotify. And just last month, MGMT released their fifth album, Loss of Life, a record which I don’t envision achieving the success of the Big Three or even Little Dark Age, but will help to solidify the band as one of the greatest musical acts of our time.
My relationship with MGMT began in 2007 with their debut album Oracular Spectacular. My older sister had a copy on CD and I remember frequently hearing “Kids” and “Time to Pretend.” At the time, my taste rarely overlapped with my sister’s, but I was always excited to hear those songs. I wouldn’t have thought to listen to them on my own time, so hearing them always felt like a treat. Oracular Spectacular was one of my earliest introductions to the world of indie and alternative music. In 2007, I was pretty much exclusively listening to classic rock, praying for the day that rock would inevitably retake its rightful place on the throne of popular music, like a devout believer waiting for the second coming of Christ. Oracular Spectacular was a big part in opening my eyes to different types of music and teaching me that a song doesn’t have to feature electric guitars to be good.
As time went on, MGMT mostly fell off of my radar. They began to resurface, however, when I was in college. As someone who is passionate about music, I often ended up handling the music at parties in college. Not necessarily because people liked what I played, but mostly because I cared more about what got played and was willing to take on the responsibility, which required temporarily detaching yourself from the party. “Electric Feel” became a party playlist staple for me. It was perfect for college parties in the mid to late 2010s since everyone knew it and could sing along, but it was old enough for people not to be sick of. With its catchy bassline and falsetto singing, it also fit nicely among the other songs I would play, like Tame Impala’s “The Less I Know the Better” and “Sit Next to Me” by Foster the People.
Oracular Spectacular
When I relistened to Oracular in July, the songs I found myself drawn to had completely changed. I mostly skipped over the Big Three since I had heard them so much. My new favorite on the record is “Weekend Wars,” a track that is dramatically different from something like “Kids” and was a clue as to where the MGMT sound was heading. Unlike with most songs, I am primarily drawn to it by the lyrics and vocal performance, rather than the instrumentals. That’s not to say the music isn’t interesting. “Weekend Wars” has some of my favorite moments in the MGMT discography, like the rhythm change in the second verse that completely re-energizes the track and the triumphant outro that I eagerly anticipate the whole song. For me, however, it’s the lyrics and vocals that keep me coming back to “Weekend Wars.” Andrew VanWyngarden, the lead singer of MGMT, delivers a quintessentially MGMT vocal performance on this song. Andrew sings in a nasally near-shout, delivering the words in ways that lodge them in my brain. It’s a style of singing that used to not sit right with me, but it recently clicked and now I find it addicting to listen to. An artist’s vocals is a make-or-break factor that can either deeply hook you or inexplicably turn you off from their music. Glass Animals is a band that people often recommend to me, and I can see why, but unfortunately Dave Bayley’s vocals just rub me the wrong way so I can’t bring myself to listen. I also think this is a totally valid reason not to listen to an artist, and I always try to respect it when someone says that about an artist I like.
The lyrics of “Weekend Wars” remind me of The Beach Boys’ abandoned masterpiece, Smile. Brian Wilson collaborated on the Smile lyrics with Van Dykes Parks, who brought an impressionistic hand to Brian’s ideas about childhood, religion and drugs. “Weekend Wars” lyrics like “Christ is cursed of fathers and martyrs” would fit well in a Smile track like “Surf’s Up,” which has many lines that create meaning out of seemingly meaningless lyrics, such as “The music hall a costly bow / The music all is lost for now / To a muted trumpeter swan.” “Weekend Wars” also brings to mind the lyrically legendary “I Am the Walrus” by the Beatles. Andrew delivers lines like “Evil $, I, yes, to find a shore” and “Every mess invested was a score” in the same punchy way that John Lennon shouts “Mister city policeman sitting” and “Expert, texpert choking smokers.”
One of the hallmarks of MGMT’s music is their cynical, impish sense of humor that douses their songs in irony. Nowhere is this better displayed than on “The Youth.” Maybe it’s because of the accompanying music video directed by Tim & Eric, but this song is so goofy to me. The chorus is an optimistic pronouncement that declares “The youth are starting to change” before asking “Are you starting to change?” It all feels too earnest and on the nose for MGMT. The song’s sincerity is further called into question when the band changes keys as they transition into a double chorus at the end of the song. It’s a variation of what’s called a “truck driver’s gear change,” which is when a song modulates upwards to add emotional punch to the song’s peak. A classic example can be found in “I Will Always Love You” by Whitney Houston. On “The Youth,” MGMT decides to modulate downwards into a lower key. Rather than having the uplifting impact that an upwards modulation has, the downward shift is a little disconcerting. I can’t help but think this move is MGMT needling overly dramatic pop ballads, whose supposed sincerity can sometimes be little more than emotional manipulation.
“Of Moons, Birds and Monsters,” another highlight for me on Oracular, slowly gallops into focus, as if approaching from a distance, before snapping into place and launching into the hardest rocking song on the album. The song is almost a pastiche of psychedelic rock, with its assertive bassline, drops to halftime, and the mesmerizing head-nodding outro. This track is a reminder that MGMT is a proper band and not just two guys messing around with synths in a studio.
One of the things that I appreciate the most about MGMT, and what makes them so interesting to listen to, is their ability to structure and arrange their songs. Every song feels like a living, breathing entity rather than a couple of verses and a chorus put together. They reward the active listeners by introducing new elements constantly and never lingering too long on one part of a song. One thing I’ve noticed about MGMT is that they like to put the hookiest part of the song at the end, rather than in a chorus that gets repeated ad nauseum (a trope they play with on “The Youth”.) The result is that you’re left with the best part stuck in your head and you want to restart the song just to hear that part for a little longer. In addition to “Weekend Wars,” “The Handshake” and “Future Reflections” are two other examples of this style of structure at work.
Of all the songs on Oracular Spectacular, “Weekend Wars” best shows the direction MGMT was moving in. Their follow-up album, Congratulations, is much more esoteric than Oracular, largely because it’s missing any kind of electro-pop single with mass appeal. To be fair, without the Big Three, Oracular Spectacular would not be as mainstream as it’s made out to be. Anyone who bought it because they liked the singles might not have liked the non-single tracks. But without a bone to throw to the masses, Congratulations saw MGMT move from indie darlings to art pop weirdos. It’s also probably the best record they’ve made so far.
Congratulations
MGMT released Congratulations in 2010, three years after Oracular Spectacular. In between albums, the band was busy playing live. They toured with Beck, opened for Paul McCartney at Fenway, and became staples of the festival scene. While Congratulations has since become a cult favorite, the album was seen as career suicide at at the time and there was speculation that the band was intentionally sabotaging their success. In reality, anyone who actually listened to Oracular should not have been surprised with the direction MGMT took for their second album. Congratulations sees the band diving deeper into the unorthodox sounds and unconventional structures they explored on Oracular Spectacular.
Congratulations had been on my radar for years before I finally began to appreciate it late last year. As a Tame Impala disciple in college, I often had this record recommended to me as a standout in modern psych rock. My friends from high school who shared similar tastes were also fans of Congratulations, but for some reason I never took to it. In retrospect, I think I was looking for a Lonerism clone and failed to appreciate the eccentricities of MGMT. But my mind was wide open when I gave it another shot in October and all it took was one listen for this album to sink its hooks in my brain.
Congratulations takes the influence of Smile by The Beach Boys (another album that took me a while to like) found on “Weekend Wars” and runs with it. I once heard a Brian Wilson quote about the making of Smile where he essentially said that he wanted the songs to change frequently because a minute feels like an eternity when you’re on drugs and so he didn’t want any one part to last too long. That feels like the ethos that MGMT used when making Congratulations; many of the songs have numerous different sections and jump back and forth between them. This approach, and the general surf rock feel that permeates Congratulations (just look at the album cover), suggests that The Beach Boys were a major influence for this album.
The album kicks off with “It’s Working,” a surf rock ode to ecstasy. The song introduces a new style of singing for Andrew, more gentle and less nasally. It almost sounds like his voice has been pitched up, a technique used by The Beach Boys on “Caroline, No” to make Brian sound younger. “It’s Working” features a harpsichord, one of my favorite instruments when used in psychedelic music, and one that is heard all over Smile. Thematically, the song is about drugs, a major inspiration for the lyrics of Congratulations. Andrew and Ben of MGMT are not shy about their use of psychedelics and other drugs, particularly in the wake of the success of Oracular Spectacular. Much of the lyrics on Congratulations are indecipherable but have the vague scent of drugs, something it shares with Smile. While I’m not sure there are any songs on Smile explicitly about drugs, it’s obvious that substances were an influence on the album and its lyrics.
The making of Smile was a dark time for Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys. The project was eventually abandoned due to Brian’s declining mental health, a result of his heavy drug use and the pressures he felt making such an ambitious record that he was touting as a “teenage symphony to God.” In the spirit of the mid-’60s, Brian was taking an experimental approach to his music-making process. One of his innovations was taking a modular approach to song structure. Rather than recording a song in a single take, as was customary at the time, Brian would record short fragments of music that he would later splice together, allowing for the jarring drug-inspired transitions that can be heard on Smile. MGMT seems to have been influenced by this method as the songs on Congratulations have many, many sections, especially “Flash Delirium” and “Siberian Breaks.” Depending on how you count, “Flash Delirium” has as many as seven separate sections. “Siberian Breaks” is its own beast that I will get to in a minute.
The drugged-out, manic state that Brian was in can be felt in the songs on Smile, which had its session tapes released in 2011. The music ranges from beautiful to silly, from transcendent to terrifying. There’s a sinister playfulness heard throughout Smile that can also be found on Congratulations in songs like “Song for Dan Treacy,” “Someone’s Missing,” and “Flash Delirium.” “Someone’s Missing” in particular reminds me of the unsettling version of “Wind Chimes” heard on Smiley Smile, the album The Beach Boys released using scraps of the Smile project. Both tracks are frighteningly ominous before ending in bursts of optimistic beauty.
“Siberian Breaks” is the cornerstone of Congratulations. Clocking in at 12 minutes and 9 seconds, “Siberian Breaks”is a mercurial trip of a song that best represents the Smile ethos on the album. Andrew has said that the song is eight different songs strung together into one, but each section ends up working together to create one of MGMT’s most ambitious songs. In addition to taking the modular approach of stitching together musical fragments, “Siberian Breaks” sometimes recalls Smile sonically. Some of the bass playing in particular utilizes a clicky staccato that recalls the legendary Carol Kaye’s tone and style. The fuzz tone in one part even sounds a bit like the crunchy bass on the nauseating “The Elements: Fire,” a song so evil that Brian refused to release it, believing it was cursed.
On “Siberian Breaks,” MGMT does what they do best: creating musical moments you want to live in and moving onto the next one just as you’re getting comfortable. Then as you’re getting comfortable in this new space, they’re onto the next one again. The most jarring transition comes at the end of the song, when a synth-heavy fragment is introduced that leaves behind the foundation of organic bass and drums that have anchored us through the song so far. This section sounds like a jam from Currents-era Tame Impala, which would come out five years after Congratulations.
Both Smile and Congratulations were albums made in the aftermath of success. The Beach Boys had already reached the pinnacle of commercial success and were beginning to get critical praise for Pet Sounds. With Smile, Brian was looking to create his magnum opus that would eclipse anything his peers were making. Similarly, MGMT had found mainstream success with their Big Three singles, but were itching to make music they were actually interested in creating and to be respected as artists, rather than a pop duo living the drug-fueled lives they lambasted in “Time to Pretend.” Both albums were ambitious and represented a departure in style for their respective artists. The glaring difference is that Congratulations was finished, while Smile proved to be too much for Brian and was shelved. Had Brian had an artistic partner to support him, or modern mental health resources, maybe Smile would’ve been completed. But even in its unfinished form, Smile is a landmark collection of music that forged its own brand of psychedelia and redefined the band that made it. In comparison, Congratulations was a defiant statement of independence that reformulated the MGMT sound into something just as distinctly psychedelic as Smile. In the short time that I’ve been an MGMT head, Congratulations has quickly become my favorite album by the band. It’s weird and unlike anything else I’ve heard. The album is overflowing with earworms, but you don’t notice them burying themselves into your brain. I often wake up with a random part already on a loop in my head (looking at you “Flash Delirium” and “Song for Dan Treacy.”) Finding the connections to, and inspiration of, Smile only drove home the point for me that Congratulations is MGMT’s masterpiece.
On their next three albums, MGMT took sharp turns in their musical direction. While Oracular Spectacular and Congratulations overlap sonically and share many similarities, the next three each have their own distinct sound. This stylistic diversity is part of what gives MGMT one of the most exciting discographies in contemporary music and what makes me eager to keep listening.
