The New Cue #351 January 22: MGMT
"At any given moment we'd be fine just totally destroying everything..."
Good morning,
Welcome to your weekly free edition of TNC, flashing its access all areas pass and strolling into your inbox and looking around to see if there’s any famous people about every Monday morning. Nope, just you and us again. That’s just how we like it. Today, we’ve got a chat with chameleonic indie-pop heroes MGMT to get your week rolling. Please stop calling them Management, you’re making yourself look silly.
We’ll see you on Friday for our weekly Recommender conga. Until then!
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
PS - see these buttons below? They are not just here for decoration, they are there so you can click on them and (a) become a paying subscriber if you’re not already and (b) spread the word about the incredible edition of The New Cue you are about to read. Come on, sharing is caring!
Start The Week With… MGMT
American duo MGMT have made a career out of zigzagging away from what you expect them to do. They followed Oracular Spectacular, a massively successful debut stuffed with euphoric indie-pop anthems, with a new wave psychedelic record (2010’s Congratulations), that gave way to an album of twitchy, experimental indie-rock (2013’s self-titled third album) and, after all that, 2018’s Little Dark Age, a record of 80s-tinged synth-pop that swayed between dreamy and nightmarish. What now for Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, then? On their forthcoming fifth record, the pair cherry-pick the best bits from across their career (well, most of it – they have no inclination to make Kids 2) and emerge with one of their finest records yet, if not the best. Loss Of Life contains contemplative folk, symphonic psych-pop, widescreen ballads and, in the standout Christine & The Queens duet Dancing In Babylon, a song that sounds like a lost Jim Steinman classic. It’s a remarkable record. A few weeks ago, Niall spoke to them all about it over Zoom which you can read below whilst listening to this playlist of their best songs that we made to go with it:
Hello Andrew and Ben. Where are you both?
BG: I'm in LA right now, at home.
AVW: I'm home in New England, in the woods.
Thanks for taking the time to do this. Have you done much chatting about the record yet?
BG: We're just getting started. It feels like a new experience coming back to this after several years.
I bet. Do you generally have an idea of what you're going to talk about with a record or is it not until you're faced with idiots like me and you just have to do it?
AVW: It’s once we have to face our own idiotic... idiocy? We don't really have too much of a plan. We have themes that we both agree sort of represent this album that we want to talk about but we don't have some super shiny PR things.
Haha... what were the themes you agreed on for this record?
BG: In the last couple of interviews we've done, people have quoted our press release back to us, picking these very absurd sentences that's taken out of context. It's very funny to us.
AVW: We've been out of this whole circus for a long time, for years, we're just flying by the seat of our pants mostly.
Do you feel like you’re back in it now?
BG: It almost feels like we're observing the process a little bit because it's been so long since we've done this. And so much has happened in between, just the way that things happen has changed. I mean, nobody was doing press interviews on Zoom the last time we put out a record, it's a different world. I think for us right now it feels good not to be taking it so heavy, just try to relax and enjoy the process.
Congratulations on the record, it's fantastic. Before we get into it, the last time I interviewed you was during the Oracular Spectacular tour, on your bus in San Francisco in 2008. Let’s say I’ve been living under a rock since then. What have you guys been up to?
AVW: It would take a long time to answer that… but we did the rock'n'roll thing, we did the band thing and then now we're doing more of a domestic thing. We survived pretty well. We're pretty healthy, no hard drug habits, fairly good heads on our shoulders. We just did a bunch of stuff... what did we do Ben? We toured around the world, ate lots of different cuisines.
BG: Since 2008, wow, well I live on the other side of the country now, which was big. I'm sure there's other stuff that happened... I have two dogs?
Maybe the best way to answer it is 'we just did some stuff.'
AVW: Exactly, various things! The seats of our pants have travelled all over the world, they've logged a lot of miles.
BG: I think that in terms of the band, in some ways not much has changed. We're able to be just more comfortable with who we've always been as a band. This record in some ways is about getting back to those roots, not necessarily musical roots or the style of music we're playing but more just the roots of why we started the band in the first place.
If you could sum that up that vibe you’re trying to get back to, what would it be?
BG: I think probably one of the biggest things is having a shared sense of humour, an ability to make light of situations that are awkward or sad or confusing and it’s a really important way in general for people to connect to each other. I think very early on when we met and started playing music together, that was the driving force in a lot of ways. Even if the music we're making at a certain time is more serious, we've always had an ability not to take things too seriously as a band or not to get too self-important about what we're doing.
AVW: Yeah, at any given moment we'd be fine just totally destroying everything and doing something else, probably. I mean, not doing something else besides making music, but we're just trying not to be overly precious about what we're doing, which is really difficult when you're in the whole machine and surrounded by people that are kind of living off of you. It's easy to start buying your own bullshit but I think we've done a good job of keeping an awareness of things. Somehow, and I don't know if it's because of that approach, but we've actually had a lengthy career from being a musician, which is not a very common thing.
Let's dive into this record. There are long gaps between MGMT albums. How does a new one start?
AVW: There's songs on this album that are really old, the seeds of some of the songs are very old. Nothing To Declare was a little ditty that I used to joke around and play on the guitar while we were touring in 2009 and Bubblegum Dog and Nothing Changes both have their origins in some of the sessions for Little Dark Age, our last album. Other than that, we usually just get together in a studio and jam and have a couple of song ideas that sometimes gain traction, sometimes they don't. That usually takes half a year or more, until there's a moment where something clicks and we have a more clear picture of the direction we want to go in and the sounds we want to incorporate. We started this one in 2021.
BG: When I met up with you guys in New York at Patrick [Wimberly, producer]'s studio and we recorded I Wish I Was Joking, that felt to me like the moment where it was like, ‘OK, we’re making an album now’. After that point, it felt like things moved really quickly.
AVW: That was spring 2022 when we demoed out that song, which happened very quickly. I think that’s a very MGMT song, I Wish I Was Joking, because it hits almost every note chromatically, you couldn't really sit and play it on a piano, there's always dissonant notes and things happening and even Ben - you know, we both majored in music - and Ben's an amazing piano player and Patrick Wimberly, who we worked with, is an accomplished vibraphone player but everyone was like, 'What are these chords? It doesn't make sense but it so works!'. That's a classic MGMT thing, I think. But then there's also songs on the album that really came about just from finger picking an acoustic guitar, too, so there's that nice balance.
In some ways, it feels like an album that touches on almost the whole career of MGMT, especially since Congratulations, and picks up little bits from each record and puts them in a modern setting.
AVW: I think so, and we have fun playing with that by referencing ourselves and referencing other songs, whether it's in lyrics or little musical signatures, and that's something that I think our, our fans have come to look forward to finding and exploring in our new music. We kind of leave little easter eggs for them.
Tell me about Dancing In Babylon, which features a duet with Christine & The Queens.
AVW: That was another song that really went through a lot of different shapes and phases. Like a lot of MGMT songs, it started off almost more like a joke-y, lighthearted double-time kind of thing. It was totally different from how it sounds in that finished state. I came up with a little melody after meeting this couple that had a baby and I developed this song around them called Katherine And Bobby, and that's what the song was. It's really reminded the group, Ben and Myles and Patrick, of Magnetic Fields, almost like too sugary but a little bit off. It would have been really fun to finish it off that way but it never felt like that was where it wanted to rest so we kept developing and then at some point we chopped the beat in half and made it a half-time thing and it instantly felt more like a Meatloaf-style song, moments of that with Roxy Music and all these other influences started pouring into the song.
It made me think that you two should write an MGMT musical.
AVW: That'd be really fun. I don't know if you saw what we did this past May in the festival Just Like Heaven. They had asked us to play our whole first album in its entirety - they booked us to play a concert we’ve played for decades now. Instead, we approached it almost like a musical, a stage production that had moments of dialogue and set changes, costume changes, and we had so much fun doing it. Considering that we don't really want to travel and tour, I think having a stage production would actually be a perfect thing for us to go towards.
Have you ever tried to do a duet before and it hasn’t worked out?
BG: We've talked about it a few times. I guess She Works Out Too Much on the last album was probably the first. It was that back and forth-style thing, but not quite the same.
AVW: I want to say we thought about doing that with Me And Michael too, but I'm not sure. I don't think so. I think it's kind of a new experiment for us.
BG: In some ways, too, I think that came out of a general approach with this record. When we first started the band, I think we had this attitude, like, ‘We have to do everything ourselves’. That was like a big point for us, that every single creative idea and everything on the records is coming from us. And then we've had times when we open that up more, like on Congratulations, we had a full band on the record, which is really great. On this one, we have taught ourselves to let go in some ways and just be like, an MGMT record is more about the idea of the spirit of the band and not necessarily that we need to be responsible for every little moment that happens on the record. It was liberating for us. I think also it comes across in the music that it just feels more open, to me at least.
How important was Congratulations when you look back on it now? It really feels like the moment where there was a lot of expectations on what sort of band MGMT were and you two went, ‘Well yeah we are that, but we’re also this’.
BG: Well, 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. And 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.
AVW: 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.
BG: Thinking back on it, I think that was just a really conservative time for music in general. I feel like if a band did that now, it wouldn't have gotten nearly the same reaction. I think people tend to take things in stride a little bit more in terms of like an artist trying something different. At the time, it feels like we caused a sensation by making a second album that sounded different from our first album.
I stuck it on recently and was struck by how relatively straightforward it is. I really like it but it’s not as out there as I had in my head.
AVW: It's funny how that happens and how time can kind of totally reshape how you hear something. I hear it now and I'm like, ‘It doesn't even sound like a psychedelic album to me’, except for maybe Siberian Breaks. We were just obsessed with a lot of these quirky English bands like, Deep Freeze Mice and Cleaners From Venus. That's what we listened to and we wanted to make music that sounded like that. 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.
BG: I think we enjoy being provocative and kind of weirding people out a little bit. But I think that our intention is for it to be inclusive. Some of my favourite music that stuck with me over time is music that the first time I heard it, I was like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ and then later on, it really grew on me and became my absolute favourite music. I think I would rather I would rather make music that grows on people over time. Yeah, this
When you think back to 2007/2008, when Oracular Spectacular blew up, what was the craziest moment?
BG: There have been so many. In some ways, it never felt real, it almost felt like a dream or something, moments like playing on a big stage in Glastonbury where it’s a crowd of people singing along with a melody, it never quite felt real to me. It was hard to be in the moment, especially the transition - the Congratulations touring became even more intense. Some songs had really blown up and at the same time, there was this critical backlash to the music we were making. I wish that I could have been more in the moment. It would have been much nicer to just enjoy that process and not have not worrying about what people said about it.
AVW: I have so many memories that make me really laugh for lots of different reasons, especially thinking about how by the end of 2008, we were at the height of our buzz popularity and people just wanted to come to our concerts and see, like, Daft Punk or something, like, ‘This is gonna be an electro banger concert!. 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?!’.
ND