When the synth-pop duo MGMT released their début album, “Oracular Spectacular,” in 2007, three of its songs became instant hits. “Electric Feel” was an arboreal psychedelic sex anthem that could have served as a soundtrack to “Avatar”; “Kids” and “Time to Pretend” were stranger, combining lilting melodies with an unsettling, ironic sense of freaky foreboding. These were songs about growing up in which death loomed large; it was as though Andrew VanWyngarden, MGMT’s singer, had seen a vision of someone hitting life’s fast-forward button, skipping directly from youth to the end. Record executives probably wish the band would write more party tunes in the vein of “Electric Feel.” Instead, MGMT has continued its journey to the dark side. Although the band’s music has remained hummable, the vibe has grown more ruminative and gothic: two of the best songs on its last album, “MGMT,” from 2013, were called “Introspection” and “I Love You Too, Death.”

MGMT’s new album, which comes out in February, continues the trend: it’s called “Little Dark Age,” and its newest single, “When You Die,” envisions exactly that. “You die / and words don’t do anything,” VanWyngarden sings. “It’s permanently night / and I won’t feel anything.” All the while, cheery melodies and a driving pulse make this state of nothingness sound hypnotic and inviting. The music video is both beguiling and horrifying. It stars Alex Karpovsky, of “Girls,” as a magician. He seems to be arguing with someone in his mind. He dies, then returns, then dies again. The video uses a novel digital technique to show the surfaces of the world transforming. Sometimes everything seems flat, like a pattern in a carpet; at other moments, it’s nebulous and made of stars, or biological, as though the whole universe were built from fingers or eyeballs. Later, inexplicably, we are flying through a desolate, endless landscape of mesas and canyons: this is death. The video is mystical and dreamlike, a slice of life as it unravels.

Electronic music is propulsive—the steady beat promises to take us somewhere. In some songs, it seems to go higher and higher; in others, it spirals deeper and deeper. MGMT’s songs are in this second category. Their surfaces are bewitching, but it’s their haunted interiors that make you want to listen again and again.