Do you remember about MGMT? Of course you do, their song ‘Kids’ was quite unavoidable circa 2007-8, their first album ‘Oracular Spectacular’ hit number one on the Billboard Top Heatseekers chart, they were nominated for a Grammy Award for best new artist, and they appeared in every single music festival of the planet,… I saw them opening for Beck, but they also opened for Paul McCartney, M.I.A and drew the attention of Bruce Springsteen among many others.
Then they released a second album in 2010, ‘Congratulations’, but who did listen to that one? I didn’t and apparently I wasn’t alone,… it was kind of a flop compared to their sudden success. But in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, the duo is announcing that their third album is gonna be even weirder.
They are recording it in a retreat outside Buffalo, NY and are listening to a lot of Aphex Twin and house records, they are not even using a real band but are recording it alone ‘cherry-picking the best parts of their free-form jams to construct tracks’.
Ben Goldwasser even declared : ‘We're not trying to make music that everyone understands the first time they hear it.’ And I can only applause to such a bold idea,… too many people would die to have smash hits these two had a few years ago, but they are not trying to repeat it, and are taking the experimental, difficult approach. However it turns even weirder in the following of the interview. A song called ‘Alien Days’ is apparently ‘about that feeling when a parasitic alien is in your head, controlling things’,… I just hope they haven’t converted to scientology.
So MGMT is a band who follows its inspiration, doesn’t care about making a hit, doesn’t care about its label probably putting a lot of pressure to get another ‘Kids or ‘Time to Pretend’, and doesn’t even care about fans who may not understand their music,… this leads to the question, should we respect them more for this?