MGMT Recalibrates With Little Dark Age

'I grieve in stereo/ The stereo sounds strange': once-beloved collegiate electronic pop duo MGMT (Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser) have recalibrated the balance between their eccentricity and catchiness on "Little Dark Age", the first taste of their upcoming fourth album. They now traffic in goth pop - with an accompanying music video that features an aged mansion, quill pens, a candelabra, a magician performing card tricks, plenty of mist, and a long black whip - but this is no straightforward horror show. The duo's penchant for irony and self-aware commentary remain. When VanWyngarden sings, in a slightly robotic manner, "If you get out of bed/ And find me standing all alone/ Open-eyed/ Burn the page/ My little dark age", is he referring to his band's current place in its aesthetic lineage, or this chaotic chapter of American history?

The presently unnamed fourth album was recorded with producers Patrick Wimberly and Dave Fridmann, who produced their zeitgeisty debut album Oracular Spectacular (2007). They have not returned squarely to the exuberant melodies of their best-known hits ("Kids", "Time to Pretend", "Electric Feel"), but they have also stayed away from the meandering, elliptical strangeness of their previous two albums. This song has a chorus, the verses are tight, and you can dance to this song's production despite its baroque touches and ominous scene-setting ('Policemen swear to god/ Love's seeping from the guns/ I know my friends and I/ Would probably turn and run'). Perhaps the duo is now more willing to let themselves be at ease - and have fun in the studio - now that they have sufficiently rebelled against the expectation that they would stick to their initial (money-making and crowd-pleasing) formula.