Little Dark Age

This could have been MGMT’s last chance. The narrative around the duo is well known by now: College buddies stumble into a few fluke hits, capturing a generational mix of youthful exuberance and modern ennui. Then they rocket to stardom, only to spend the next two albums kicking against everything that fans, critics, and their record company expect of them. One look at their first three albums’ declining streaming numbers on Spotify—2013’s MGMT has just four percent the plays of their 2007 debut—confirms that the band’s fan base has steadily winnowed over the past 11 years, whether or not MGMT fully intended it.

That’s hardly surprising. Indie has changed over the last decade-plus, yet MGMT’s Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser have seemed uninterested in keeping up. A glimpse at some of 2007’s other big albums—by Panda Bear and Animal Collective, Of Montreal, Arcade Fire, et al.—suggests to what extent their initial success fit into a broader trend of yelpy, brightly-hued indie with a toe dipped gingerly into electro-pop. But the zeitgeist quickly shifted toward bigger, bolder sounds, and as Chvrches, Purity Ring, and scads of other acts popped up with sleeker, more commercial versions of “Electric Feel,” MGMT stubbornly doubled down on wooly psychedelic navel-gazing.

The good news is that Little Dark Age marks a welcome shift in tactics. Much of the belabored excess of the last two albums is gone. They have traded the shaggy 1960s references and overstuffed arrangements for comparatively streamlined pop, and they have rediscovered their ability to write hooks. The dark undercurrent that has always permeated their music is still here, but the lyrics are less diaristic and more focused, less acid-soaked and more acid-tongued.

The opening “She Works Out Too Much” shows just how much the duo has evolved in a relatively short time. Slathered in jazzy chords and funk bass, it’s almost unrecognizable as MGMT. Ostensibly, it’s a song about dating-app fatigue. The chorus is a he-said/she-said battle of gym memberships; it’s introduced by a narrator who might be a PC Music–schooled spin-class instructor. A vocoded voice in the chorus sounds like it’s singing “Destroy.” The whole thing is absurd, and far more fun than it has any reason to be. It’s also a good bellwether for what follows.

They go goth on “Little Dark Age,” a synth-heavy dirge that sounds like a B-side to Gary Numan’s “Cars.” On “When You Die,” they ponder the void (“It’s permanently night/And I won’t feel anything”) over a breezy tune that sounds almost like Metronomy, and the contrast between the song’s suicidal urges and its chipper mood is what makes it so engaging. “Me and Michael” is a note-perfect rendering of a mid-’80s John Hughes soundtrack, a mode they pick up again on “One Thing Left to Try,” a fence-swinging festival anthem. Two of the album’s best songs are its most unassuming: VanWyngarden drops his voice to an exaggerated baritone on the wistful “James,” sounding pleasantly like Stephin Merritt. And “Days That Got Away,” the album’s lone instrumental, poses a dubby thought experiment: What if chillwave still existed in 2018, and didn’t suck?

Not all of this stuff is necessarily necessary. “One Thing Left to Try” sounds suspiciously like Empire of the Sun, and one of them is more than enough. Similarly, the album probably doesn’t need two songs about the evils of the hand-held internet. (In addition to “She Works Out Too Much,” we also get “TSLAMP,” or “Time Spent Looking at My Phone,” which, spoiler alert: They are none too pleased about it.) But the duo’s delight in sound itself is often infectious. The album is a riot of vintage synthesizers, dubby effects, and sumptuously gated snares, and they round out that ’80s fixation with just the right amount of psych-pop. Flangers flange, phasers phase, and the stereo panning spins like a Tilt-a-Whirl, but for once, the bells and whistles don’t drown out the songwriting.

While VanWyngarden’s lyrics have often strayed toward the impenetrable, here he’s more focused, settling into a dark mood that feels timely. Little Dark Age is an album about certainties dissolving. “Welcome to the shit-show/Grab a comfortable seat,” VanWyngarden sings in the very first song, pretty much summing up the second half of the current decade. It’s telling that the album’s most sing-along-friendly refrain is the rousing “Go fuck yourself!” of “When You Die.” Toward the end of the LP, “When You’re Small” makes a compelling argument for strategic downsizing: “When you’re small/You don’t have very far to fall.”

At this point, MGMT probably know a thing or two about the fear of falling. They seem to acknowledge as much on the closing “Hand It Over,” which, like Congratulations’ eponymous final song, is a kind of reckoning with their career, a self-aware snapshot of the whole complicated business of being MGMT. “If we lose our touch/It won’t mean much,” sings VanWyngarden, as if acknowledging their tenuous grasp on whatever brass ring the music industry once offered. The Beach Boys harmonies and Sgt. Pepper’s horns are familiar—it’s the first time on the album they sound like the old MGMT, really. “The joke’s worn thin,” he sings, early in the song, and, later, “The smart ones exit early.” It’s a long way from the rock-star fantasies of “Time to Pretend.” But if Little Dark Age is a new start, it’s a promising one.

MGMT: Little Dark Age

$35 at Rough Trade

$27 at Amazon

$27 at Target