Under New MGMT

Here’s the scenario – you start a party band at college, play some gigs that involve you singing over the Ghostbusters theme tune amidst hoards of naked students, decide to write some of your own songs which then get picked up and released by an independent New York label but are swiftly consigned to the annals of lost gems as you graduate and go your separate ways. Then, a year later while you’re off starting life working your first jobs you get a email from Columbia Records offering you a record deal. This isn’t a novel about a fictional band; this is the story behind MGMT’s rise to prominence which begun way back in 2004, a rise that many are getting excited about including Gigwise.

“It was really kind of random how we got signed,” explains Andrew VanWyngarden one half of the bands crux duo (the other half being Ben Goldwasser). “We weren’t even together as a band at that point. And we’d never really gigged outside of Wesleyan (the college the duo attended) or Connecticut really. Me and Ben really hadn’t spoken for around seven months around that time, Ben was up in the woods somewhere doing construction and I was just doing random work. It was nearly a year after we graduated, I was going to move to the West Coast to start a new life but then we got the email.” So off the back of one small release and an old internet page they signed to one of the world’s biggest record labels.

Pretty daunting for a couple of twenty something’s with little experience of being in a band we think you’ll agree. “We hadn’t even worked together making music in so long and then that winter we were sitting down writing and recording an album in a studio. We got the hang of it pretty quickly though!” That album is ‘Oracular Spectacular’, out later this year, which was produced by Flaming Lips collaborator Dave Fridmann and flits between epic avant-rock and noodling psych-pop in the vain of the band's most dynamic tune to date ‘Time To Pretend’, which alongside the track ‘Kids’ the only survivor from their original EP release on NYC’s Cantora Records (which was formed especially for the release).

Speaking about the recording process in more depth VanWyngarden explains: “We recorded it really quickly, in like twenty days. We were expecting to get fucked over a lot more than we did, they pretty much let us do what we want.” On Fridmann’s input Goldwasser is eager to add: “He helped us be a lot more confident to take things in a new direction. He really helped us create the realisation of what our demos had hoped to be, they now have a fuller sounding feel.” Following the studio work the band then had the task of moving the new material into the live arena, something they did with the addition of several new band members, something which the pair believe help them realise their ideas even more.