Synth-pop duo MGMT (Andrew VanWyngarden and Benjamin Goldwasser) appears to be making good on their promise to re-dominate our mind holes in 2017 – and in early 2018. They recently premiered "When You Die” on The New Yorker, and revealed that their upcoming fourth album Little Dark Age will be released in February next year (the title track was released in October). The song was the result from a collaboration with a new producer (Patrick Wimberly, who recently worked with Chairlift and Kelela) and an old collaborator (Dave Fridmann, who produced their debut LP Oracular Spectacular), and manages to achieve a good balance between their early mainstream appeal and unabashed inclinations towards the eccentric and esoteric.
The sonic and ideological legacy of “Time to Pretend” can certainly be found on “When You Die”: both present exquisitely catchy melodies which are warped by accessible thoughts about mortality and pessimism about the conventional rituals of adulthood (as reflected by their band name, which is an abbreviation of 'The Management'). The psychedelic synths on these tracks bewitch and beguile, numbing us to the everyday drudgery being described. One could pretend to pretend to be pysched about waking up for a daily commute to an office job (‘Don’t you have somewhere to be/ At seven-thirty’), somehow empowered by the irony of it all. The new music video visually foregrounds this aspect of the song, as an amateur magician (Girls’ Alex Karpovsky) flits in between life and death. The physical and biological surfaces around him metamorphose into stars, landscapes, fingers, flowers, pearls, eyeballs and the surface of internal tissue (via AI Style Transfer technology).
There’s a calming, escapist mystique to all this surrealism, but the overt gothic edge in their new songs is also accompanied by a more direct and urgent address. VanWyngarden appears to be addressing an antagonist that is both ideological and human when he spits out the opening verse (even if the purported anger seems to be quite performative): ‘Don’t call me nice/ I’m gonna eat your heart out/ I’ve got some work to do/ Baby, I’m ready, I’m ready, ready, ready to/ Blow my lid off’. The video suggests that the song is a meditation of what it means to die, but the lyrics seem more interested in communicating a kind of apathetic nihilism about a 9-to-5 existence, which then takes on that familiar tragicomic note: ‘You die/ And words won’t do anything/ It’s permanent night/ And I won’t feel anything/ We’ll all be laughing with you when you die’. With you (not at you), as everyone is presumably in the same boat.
