Illustration by We Buy Your Kids; photos by Jason Nocito

Passion Pit: "Take a Walk" (via SoundCloud)

It's pouring rain when I get to Manhattan's Hammerstein Ballroom for this year's Webby Awards. The event tries to squeeze the absurdly infinite scope of the internet into something that can be quantified and judged in under three hours. Winners range from Björk to that "Shit Girls Say" video to an animated cat with a Pop-Tart body that surfs a never-ending rainbow. Joke-song outfit Key of Awesome performs "Eat It, Don't Tweet It", an R&B-laced parody about how people shouldn't post pictures of their meals on Twitter: "I'm just a guy with a camera/ In your feed/ With my food as a canvas-a." At one point, a faux-obituary montage honoring all the defunct internet memes of the past 12 months-- Angelina Jolie's leg, the Tupac hologram, "Tanning Mom"-- flashes across a big screen. The ephemerality of it all makes the future seem hopelessly irrelevant.

Passion Pit are set to perform their single "Take a Walk" at the ceremony. It's the opening track from the Boston band's second album, Gossamer, and it follows in the anthemic tradition of their 2009 breakout, Manners: bouncy synths, relentlessly stomping rhythm, plenty of whoa-oh-ohs. The whole thing sounds perfect for placement in a cell phone commercial or, you know, the bumper music for a meaningless awards show. But, like many Passion Pit songs, it's also more complicated than it initially seems, telling the story of a father trying-- and failing-- to make ends meet in recession-era America. Picking up on the topical lyrics, a Fox News reporter on the red carpet outside asks band mastermind Michael Angelakos whether the song carries "anti-socialist" messages. "I thought, 'That is so Fox News of you," says the wiry singer backstage, bemused.

Leading up to their appearance, Passion Pit's dressing room feels more like a hospital waiting room. And it's only after they're done playing to the crowd of silent, tech-biz elbow rubbers that their spirits are exponentially lifted. Talking about the odd gig a few weeks later, Angelakos admits, "We tried as hard as we could to pretend that we were having a good time, but we were miserable."

If you've heard a single synth squiggle of his music over the last three years, there's a good chance you've underestimated Michael Angelakos' ambition and complexity. On the brink of the festival-sized Gossamer, he also recently worked with Usher and Nelly Furtado, and has been sought out by other pop heavyweights including Britney Spears. He wants to make a piano-based solo album in the vein of one of his musical heroes, Randy Newman. Talking about upcoming videos, he mentions bold names like Terrence Malick, Faye Dunaway, Sofia Coppola, and Jake Gyllenhaal as potential collaborators, though none are confirmed as of yet. His music will be featured as part of the soundtrack to the final installment of the Twilight film series later this year. (He's hoping to convince Kristen Stewart to star in a future Passion Pit video, too.) Angelakos turned 25 in May, and he's been so busy that, in the week leading up to it, he forgot what day his birthday was.

And even as his plans pile up, Angelakos carries the same social insecurities you'd expect from anyone in the throes of their mid-20s. He's been guarded with the press in the past, sometimes simply hanging up on journalists if he feels like the conversation's going south. "If you ask me something that's really off-putting, I'll have a hard time concealing my emotions," he tells me. "I'm not a businessman in that sense."

The defensiveness comes from a real place. Angelakos is aware of the barbs that have been aimed in Passion Pit's direction since Manners came out: it's too poppy, it's cartoonish, it could soundtrack an episode of "Dora the Explorer". There's the singer's voice, which is sometimes dismissed as all-helium, all-the-time. He's heard it all, and it bothers him. Over dinner one night, he casually notes that his vocal range spans four octaves. After an audio specialist at a hi-fi store we visit tells Angelakos that Gossamer is "actually great," the singer accepts the praise gracefully, only to gripe immediately after leaving the shop. "Actually great!" he exclaims with an exasperation that suggests he's been in this situation before. "Why does there always have to be an actually in there?"

Below Passion Pit's glistening burst-and-bloom fantasias, there exists a phenomenal amount of emotional carnage. Angelakos regularly refers to Manners as claustrophobic and "narcissistic," and on closer inspection, a certain mania shines through its lush, multi-chromatic grooves. It sounds like the exploration of a very singular mentality-- specifically, the excited, frantic, and totally befuddled mind of a 22-year-old college dropout whose home-recorded beginnings became a MySpace-to-major-label overnight success story. "Look at me/ Oh, look at me/ Is this the way I've always been?", Angelakos hollers on the chorus of Manners' "The Reeling", a panicked rush about questioning the very existence of your own life. It's also one of Passion Pit's most popular songs.

If Manners was a collection of quickly scribbled, anxious diary entries, Gossamer is Angelakos' self-excoriation. He wrote and performed the album on his own, sharing co-production duties as well; while it's certainly more expansive than its predecessor, Angelakos spends much of the album looking inward, focusing hard on his own personal traumas, of which there are quite a few. Depression, substance abuse, suicide, and familial strife are all present, topped off with mistrust towards love and others' intentions. There's hope, too, but it's open-ended. "I've told people that I don't see myself living very long," he tells me matter-of-factly. "That really upsets them, but I'm just being honest."

On March 19, 2009-- less than two months before Manners' release-- Passion Pit played a daytime showcase at Austin's SXSW festival. "I don't actually remember a lot about how we got out there," Angelakos now says of his overall SXSW experience. "I was going through a hard time understanding what was going on with Passion Pit. "

The confusion is understandable. After Angelakos' first Passion Pit project-- 2008's Chunk of Change EP, a Valentine's Day present to a soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend-- generated a swarm of buzz, the band shuttled from Boston house parties to upper-tier indie label Frenchkiss to major label Columbia in less than a year. Soon after, Angelakos and band member Nate Donmoyer recorded Manners. And after SXSW, the singer and his group were scheduled to embark on a massive tour of Europe. Life was getting busy, and fast.

"I was drinking heavily," says the frontman, recalling the SXSW gig. "I mentioned how I shaved for this girl I was involved with. The band was drunk, but they still were like, 'What the fuck is going on?' I started standing on my vintage keyboards and freaking the fuck out. It got to the point where I was just rolling around on the grass, going crazy. When I got off the stage, all the Columbia people there were very excited. I was on the side, and I was crying. I couldn't control it."

Far from your typical post-show euphoria, Angelakos was experiencing what he refers to as a dissociative psychotic reaction-- his stress reached a biological level that induced a breakdown. "Everything was a blur. We were doing promo appearances, and I didn't even know who I was talking to. No one knew me well enough to say, 'There's something wrong.' They just thought I was drunk."

When SXSW concluded, the frontman went directly from Austin to Houston, where he was admitted to a clinic for issues related to his mental health. He was there for roughly five weeks, where he shared a room with a "wonderful" former firefighter who had been convicted of arson. The band visited him during his stay, and attempted to sneak in positive reviews of Manners, since Angelakos wasn't allowed to even verbally acknowledge what was going on with his career while at the clinic.

"It's a horrible hospital," he says, gravely. "They yell at you and make you feel like you're small. They do all these terrible tests. They wake you up and check on you every 15 minutes. They brought things out of me while I was on drugs that I didn't want to take. Everything you do, they monitor. I wouldn't go to any of the courses they offered, so I wasn't allowed to go outside for an entire month. There's a book that contains every single movement I made over the course of that month-- it freaks me out thinking about the fact that, somewhere, that book exists."

Angelakos was born in the New Jersey town of New Brunswick. His family moved to Buffalo, N.Y., in 1999, when his father changed careers from music teacher to "very successful" stockbroker. At seven, he started his first band, Dead Grass, and made himself a canvas tote bag as personal merch, emblazoned with a painting of a meadow on fire and fake band members lying about. While attending high school in the early 2000s, he developed a love for ska, show tunes, and slowcore indie rock, and composed scores for school plays.

When he was 18, Angelakos was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. "It's a constant thing-- I'm on suicide watch all the time," he says, with straightforward nonchalance, on a June evening in his Brooklyn Heights apartment. "It's something I have a history with, so people don't trust me. They try to take it easy with me, and I don't like it, because I don't want to be known as an artist that's super volatile." A year later, while attending Boston's Emerson College, Angelakos attempted to take his own life: "Creativity essentially leads to suicide-- where you think to cut yourself up, sit in the bathtub, and take more medication than you should."

The incident is alluded to in the glitchy Gossamer closer "Where We Belong", where he sings, "And then I'm lifted up/ Out of the crimson tub/ The bath begins to drain/ And from the floor he prays away all my pain." Talking about it now, he says, "I envisioned the archangel Gabriel lifting me up. It was a really gruesome scene. I walked myself to the hospital and waited for four hours-- my coat had blood seeping through it, and I was passing out on the floor. The hospital employees finally realized what was wrong with me and said, 'Why didn't you tell us what was happening?' I didn't tell them because I was embarrassed." Following the suicide attempt, he was placed on medication that made it difficult for him to concentrate in class. "I didn't like the people very much, but I loved school. I was just so fucked up."

Before he started dating his fiancée, Kristy Mucci, three years ago, Angelakos had little experience with serious relationships. "I was very carnivorous. I just thought I was going to ruin someone else's life, and someone was going to be impeding on my life, too. I don't know how to make sense of love or lust-- that's why I write a lot about it." "Love Is Greed", Gossamer's sweeping sorta-centerpiece, represents Angelakos' latest attempt to understand the existence of love, or lack thereof: "If we really love ourselves/ How could we love somebody else?" After dating for a year and a half, he proposed to Mucci near the end of 2010 (he recently re-proposed during a California vacation because the first try was, in his words, "shitty"). "On a literal level, love does not make sense," he says, "but that's what makes it love."

In a basic sense, Mucci takes care of him, mixing light teasing with a not-so-light concern for his well-being. She's tried to steer Angelakos away from buying a siphon coffee maker because she's worried about him handling a Bunsen burner on his own, he tells me while rolling his eyes. He returns the affection by putting to work some of his other idiosyncratic obsessions, pointing out the abundance of fresh flowers in their apartment to me as "what I do to keep her happy." Angelakos says he's currently drawing up his will, and mentions that a good deal of his estate and assets will go to Mucci. "She's the one who's saved my life so many times."

Work on Gossamer began in early 2011, when Angelakos and engineer Alex Aldi headed out to Los Angeles to meet with potential studio collaborators, including hip-hop veteran No I.D. The decision rankled Manners producer Chris Zane. "I was at a party and somebody was like, 'I heard you guys aren't working together anymore,'" says Zane, who's assisted a broad range of acts-- from Les Savy Fav to Mumford & Sons-- in the studio over the last decade. "I was like, 'Hm, OK.' I was upset." According to Angelakos, "There was never any time in Los Angeles where we thought Chris was going to do the record. I wanted to try something different."

But it didn't take long for the recording situation in L.A. to switch from "different" to difficult. Sessions with industry heavies ultimately proved fruitless. "The more I would hear about how it was going with other producers, I was like, 'Oh boy, that sounds bad,'" says Zane. Eventually, Angelakos and Aldi moved into L.A.'s Paramour mansion, a locale that the singer refers to as "the stupidest place in the world to work." There was an outdoor (saltwater) pool and gorgeous (yet acoustically inconvenient) marble walls, not to mention even more obvious distractions-- at one point, they shared space with a lingerie-model photo shoot. Plus: ghosts. "The place was haunted," says Angelakos, dead serious. "We'd randomly walk through perfume, and there were lights on when no one was in the house. We could feel the presence of something."

That presence may have also been the frontman's Columbia bosses, who were feeling increasingly frustrated with the lack of results coming out of the L.A. retreat. "I don't think Michael really felt at home," says Aldi. "But I didn't want to bring it up, since we rented the place for three months. So I kept saying, 'This is great. Let's see what happens.'" Not much did. Stressed and depressed, Angelakos headed back to Brooklyn.

On his return, though, he couldn't get out of bed. He took a dose of an antidepressant, which sent him headlong into a bout of mania that lasted nearly two months. "I went completely psychotic," he says. "I started drinking about one and a half liters of expensive gin a day. It was a way to rein in the mania-- but when you are manic, you don't want it turned off and you don't know that anything is wrong. It's like asking someone that has never seen a mirror before to describe what they look like. They just don't have any perspective. You're in it. You're there. That's it."

During this period, he'd fallen in with some friends that encouraged his bad habits-- friends like the "Sylvia" addressed in Gossamer's "Cry Like a Ghost", a bright beam of a song that originated from an abandoned beat created years before for rapper Jay Electronica. His fiancée bore the brunt of this particular episode, though. "I was really terrible to Kristy. I scared her a lot. I attempted to jump out the window of our apartment, and she tackled me to the floor. I was paranoid, I thought my career was over."

"Everyone was telling her, 'Why are you with this guy?' At a certain point, she realized, 'Wait, Michael hasn't seen his doctors in a while, he's fucking manic.' If she had left me, there is no question that I would have killed myself. I don't remember anything I did-- which is terrifying, because now I have to live with this guilt." A few songs on Gossamer-- specifically, "I'll Be Alright" and "Constant Conversations"-- directly address this period, and Mucci finds those tracks hard to listen to. The triumphant "On My Way" is all but dedicated to her, a plea for wedded bliss wrapped up in a promise for self-betterment: "Just believe in me, Kristina/ All these demons, I can beat them."

Last August, Angelakos finally reached out to Zane for help with the album, but the ship wasn't righted just yet. "The night before we headed into the studio, we met up for dinner and Michael did not have it together," Zane says. "He was so wasted that he could barely stand up. The next day, Alex and I had lunch with him and said, 'We can't work together if you don't stop drinking.'" Angelakos acquiesced, and the following day, he flicked off the booze, like a switch. However, the intense physical exhaustion that followed the summer's trauma caused Angelakos to suffer from chronic fatigue that lasted for three of the seven months that it took to finish Gossamer.

"The album was just a huge nightmare to make," Aldi says. The slow-moving process caused Zane to threaten to quit the project altogether twice late last year. For Angelakos, the second instance was a turning point. "Chris couldn't take how fucked up I was, and he didn't think the album was going to happen," says the frontman. "I had to be like, 'We're going to continue working, and I'm going to show you why.'" He then sat at his computer and started putting together "I'll Be Alright"-- 20 minutes later, both were hard at work on the song.

There are plenty of audacious moments on Gossamer, grand tracks that show a leap in intricacy when it comes to Angelakos' songwriting, but "I'll Be Alright" stands out. Its wordless, hyper-sliced chorus, especially, is a headrush zipped up on its own momentum. The song's scrambled charge puts the band light years ahead of most of their festival-headliner counterparts. Talking about the meaning behind the track at the restaurant in NYC's swank Jane Hotel, Angelakos says, "I was just fucking tired of putting someone through pain. I was like, 'Listen, I'm crazy, so get the fuck out. I am never going to get better.' The party is over."

Passion Pit: "I'll Be Alright" (via SoundCloud)

Three months and 11 tracks later, with plenty of frustrated push-and-pull in between, Gossamerwas finished. Everyone's happy with the results, but the arduous creative process took its toll on Zane and Aldi. "I couldn't function, man," Zane says, talking about the record's aftermath. "I just couldn't face people. I would leave the studio, go home, stare at the ceiling, take an Ambien, wake up and do it all over again-- for four months straight." Aldi puts it simply: "I'm still adjusting." But to hear Michael tell it, the record wouldn't have been completed without the added toil and strife. "I thrive under a chaotic environment, but I also create it. It's a sadomasochistic thing. Dissatisfaction and creation are inextricably linked, so you cannot be satisfied."

I'm at Angelakos and Mucci's apartment late on a Thursday night last month. The two-floor abode in Brooklyn Heights is spaciously designed with personal artifacts dotted around-- an antique cigarette lighter, an old-timey steel guitar, a note from Mucci hanging in the kitchen: "Please keep the house clean, I love you <3 K." The couple doesn't own a television, because they'd rather encourage chatter between their guests; they use a projector to watch films and TV shows on DVD when they feel like it.

We're finishing up a four-hour interview that spans most of the troubles Angelakos has been through over the last 10 years, taking pauses to watch YouTube videos of Nina Simone, eat pizza, and listen to Yo La Tengo's ...And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out on vinyl. When I leave just after midnight, Angelakos and I make plans to meet up again the following week, possibly during one of the band's rehearsals leading up to a string of upcoming shows.

The next day, we text back and forth throughout the morning and early afternoon. He mentions that Rick Rubin, who pushed him to put the single "Constant Conversations" on Gossamer after he was originally reluctant, asked him to do some production work for Kid Cudi's next album. "Would you do it?" he asks me. "A chance to make Cudi's music more tolerable? Not a bad gig," I respond. And then, nothing. As the day passes, the silence grows. Over the weekend, I catch myself wondering if Michael is doing OK.

He isn't. The following Sunday evening, I get a short, terse email: "whats your cell … kind of weird/important news. dont have my phone on me." It's followed up with some unfamiliar phone numbers and, after a few attempts, I get ahold of Angelakos on a patchy connection. He's in a mental health facility in upstate New York, where he was admitted the day after our interview in his apartment. He stresses that "everything is fine," but tells me only a few people know he's been admitted. He's unsure as to whether his band knows yet, and asks me not to tell his label where he is. He says he'll be in contact when he's released in a week. A week passes, and then some more time, too. I don't hear from him.

We meet next two weeks after the phone conversation, in Providence, R.I., where Passion Pit's been rehearsing for a pair of shows set for the next two days: a 5,000-strong homecoming concert at Boston's Bank of America Pavilion and a headlining slot at NYC's Governor's Ball festival. At first, Angelakos seems completely fine, only mentioning his most recent hospital stay to complain about the quality of coffee they served there.

In the van to Boston, he goes into a bit more detail. The morning after our conversation, he woke up and realized things were going well with his career as the brains behind Passion Pit. And then he worried about the onset of failure that could follow and made plans to "end on a high note" and jump off of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway at 5 p.m. that day. In the afternoon, though, he tried to acquire a refill of medication from one of his doctors, who noticed something was up and took him to be admitted to a treatment facility immediately.

During our many interviews, Angelakos was uncharacteristically open with his history of mental illness, but, initially, he was hesitant about divulging this most recent incident. That reluctance extends to the reason why he's kept his bipolar diagnosis shrouded from the public eye-- he doesn't want to be known as "the bipolar artist." In the most basic sense, that is what he is; Angelakos is an artist, and he suffers from rapid cycling bipolar 1. His disorder is part of who he is, but he doesn't want it to define him.

But now that Angelakos is being more forthcoming, he's making it count. On next year's Record Store Day, he hopes to release a new Passion Pit EP, with the proceeds going toward charities that support research on bipolar disorder. "I don't think people talk about mental illness a lot, but they need to know it's OK to talk about how they are feeling. People are afraid of telling the truth because they think it's going to hurt everyone around them. I've kept so much inside that I've literally lost it. I wish more people would get help when they feel like they need it-- not just to look to medicine, but to the support of others." As he tells me this on a sticky June afternoon, he chokes up a bit.

Passion Pit's lifespan as a touring act could potentially be in doubt due to Angelakos' condition. Indeed, just this week, the band was forced to cancel six dates due to "mental health" issues, according to a note from Angelakos on the band's website. "He definitely should not be touring," says the group's keyboard/guitar player Ian Hultquist. "That lifestyle is not made for him. You can see it in his face when he's not doing well. He's constantly working on making and keeping himself healthy, but whenever he's in a weak state, it's the worst place for him to be."

Angelakos concurs. "My lifestyle doesn't bode well with what any doctor has told me I need to do to regulate my disorder," he tells me on the way to the Boston show. "I can do it while I'm young, but the older I get, the harder it's gonna become. There's this clock ticking, and at a certain point an alarm is gonna go off: 'You're done touring.' Nothing in my life comes easily."

Until then, there's Boston. The day leading up to the concert includes an acoustic session for radio station WFNX followed by an impromptu Q&A, a brief photo shoot at the Museum of Fine Arts, and then a visit to a vocal doctor-- the same one that labelmate Adele sees-- to make sure everything's OK for the show. After soundcheck, Angelakos has his tour manager take him back to the hotel so he can "get away from all this" before the performance.

While he's gone, things start to unravel backstage. The opening band is a no-show. And then, as the pavilion begins to fill up an hour and a half before Passion Pit's set to take the stage, the power goes out. The place goes dark, as do the streets and buildings surrounding it. While promoters, venue employees, and the band's management engage in hushed-circle discussions, everyone breaks into the slowly warming beer stash. Someone says that it's a good thing Michael isn't around to witness it all go down.

When Angelakos gets back to the venue, he actually seems pretty OK about the show hanging in the balance. That's because, as I learn later, he was secretly hoping it wouldn't happen at all: "I was so freaked out about my voice-- half of it is psyche, you know? You could shut your legs off with your brain if you wanted to." At 9 p.m., I overhear a whisper that the show's going to be called off. Then, almost as if it was planned, the power turns on and the crowd roars from the other side of the amphitheater. Everyone's face lights up, even Michael's.

In the weeks following the Boston show, Michael and I stay in touch, our conversation topics lighthearted and friendly. He tells me he's trying to feel better these days, and mentions that he's currently watching season six of "Frasier". Earlier this week-- and hours before the recent show cancellations-- I get a text: "Im going back to the hospital. Wish me luck." "Are you OK?" No answer.