“When it was time to make their fifth album ‘Loss of Life’, MGMT were armed with some quantifiable assurance that yes, people still cared. Throughout the first early stages of the pandemic, the title track to their 2018 album ‘Little Dark Age’ had become a TikTok and streaming smash, notching nearly 600 million plays on Spotify; it also spawned videos from millions of users – some of whom too young”
“Even Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser’s crash-landing introduction was nothing short of bewildering. In the odd dying embers of guitar music, nobody could predict the steep rise of a duo dressed as Lost Boys talking about electric eels. MGMT had wormed their way into the pop charts as if through druggy hypnosis, which is probably the best descriptor for the unforgettable “Kids” riff anyway. ”
“Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser’s fifth album is their most mature and reflective take on washed-out psych-rock yet—arriving easy, loose and immersive.”
““Psychedelic? I don’t even know what that means,” Andrew VanWyngarden recently quipped in an interview with Uncut, re-enforcing the indefinable, mind-bending ethos of his and Ben Goldwasser’s MGMT. Nearly twenty years since their career, genre and decade-defining debut single “Time to Pretend,” MGMT have fulfilled their make-music-make-money mantra, and have struggled to evade its massiveness. Len”
“After a 2018 album hailed as a return to form, the duo shifts to slick, big-tent pop pastiche—Britpop, power ballads, ’80s excess—delivered with arched brows and palpable yearning.”
“When their 2007 debut Oracular Spectacular was a surprise hit, Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser could have taken the easy option and gone on to achieve ever-diminishing returns in trying to replicate its bioluminescent brilliance. Instead, they’ve since plotted their own course, taking in low-key psych-folk, acid-rock and most recently synthpop on 2018’s excellent Little Dark Age. Their fift”
