Photos by Sandy Kim

MGMT: "Alien Days" (via SoundCloud)

The first thing you notice are the headbands. On this Wednesday evening in early June, MGMT are headlining Artpark Amphitheater in the sleepy town of Lewiston, New York, near Niagara Falls. The psych-pop act's self-titled third album has yet to be officially announced at the time of the show, but they still sell out the 10,000-capacity venue and, by the end of the night, roughly 1,000 hopeful attendees will be turned away. Despite the presence of a few stray parents, twentysomething nerds, and lonely guys with ponytails, the crowd is young enough to make even a college freshman question their own mortality. The throng of teens gab and hop while sporting neon sunglasses, half-shirts, full-body catsuits-- and headbands. More headbands than I ever thought I'd see in one place.

These kids are emulating the shaman-chic look MGMT spearheaded with their 2007 major-label debut album, Oracular Spectacular. It's a dippy, acid-burned image that founding members Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser have spent many of the last half dozen years trying to shake, delving further and further into a heady-- yet hardly commercial-- musical abyss in the process. For this tour, they've notably stricken their biggest hit to date, Oracular's platinum-selling "Kids", from the setlist-- a move that one underaged concertgoer tells me she's "very upset about," before asking if I could buy her some beers. She's not alone. As I speak to others in the audience, it becomes clear what they're here to hear, and it's not the new stuff. A group of high schoolers admit that they don't even know Congratulations, MGMT's polarizing second album from 2010, even exists.

The band is aware of these expectations, nearly to a fault. "There are still people who secretly hope that we’re going to come out with an album of songs that sound like 'Kids,'" laments Goldwasser, in a tone that suggests the past isn't worth revisiting. VanWyngarden is more diplomatic on the subject. Kind of. "With pretty much every song on this new album, we were like, 'This time we’re gonna write a pop song,'" he explains. "But at this point in our careers, we can’t write a pop song." There's no trace of remorse in his voice. "If we tried, we’d either get bummed out, or we'd change it enough until it was something that we actually liked."

This artist-audience stalemate plays out in real time during the duo's final recording session for the new album, back in March. Goldwasser and VanWyngarden are holed up in Tarbox Road Studios, the upstate New York recording hub owned by Oracular producer Dave Fridmann, who's also known for his work with bong-friendly elites including the Flaming Lips and Tame Impala. After a year's worth of improvisational studio sessions, the 10-track album is, quite literally, 90% done-- the duo are here to record one more song.

Goldwasser's wiry hair, glasses, and grey sweater make him look ready to crunch numbers at a tech startup; VanWyngarden is a bit more dressed for the zoned-out frontman part, donning a tattered Star Trek shirt and a knit cap with a puffin on it. Even beyond their get-ups, they're complementary opposites: Goldwasser's the analytical one, while VanWyngarden's spirit roams free. "Whenever I look over Ben's shoulder, he's always looking at some math equation or something," says touring bassist Matthew Asti. "They get into tiffs because they're so different."

The two make their way to the control room with Fridmann, who triggers a harsh techno pulse while VanWyngarden noodles around on a keyboard. When Goldwasser makes a quick exit, his bandmate jokes, "It seems like we've driven Ben out of the room once again." He's quick to return, though, and starts performing surgery on some gear while Fridmann and VanWyngarden toy around with the heavy techno framework for a while more. A little less than an hour later, Goldwasser decides it's time to speak up.

"At the risk of being a person who doesn't appreciate crazy synth noises," he starts, before suggesting that focusing on the blaring beat might not be the best way to go about writing a proper song. The mood turns tense. VanWyngarden's face looks confused, slightly wounded. "I don't want to add stuff that just makes it sound more like techno music," Goldwasser says, claiming that he'd rather "jam on a guitar" and focus "less on sound design and more on playing something." Then Goldwasser disappears again.

When he's gone, VanWyngarden turns to the console and blasts the techno track again, proceeding to add more textures and effects with a smile on his face. Goldwasser returns with an electric guitar-- "the only one we brought with us"-- and starts fiddling around on it. Then VanWyngarden retreats to the other end of the couch, throws on some headphones, and opens his laptop. I soon hear him excessively chuckling to himself as Goldwasser zeroes in on the guitar-- he's watching surfing videos on YouTube.

Later that night, though, MGMT start to laugh together. "They were struggling for hours, and then suddenly they were both giggling, so I started marking down those moments," Fridmann recalls a few months later. "Once they’re both laughing at the same time, they’re there."

The resulting track, "Astro-Mancy", is an insular collage of downcast vocals and orbiting sonic detritus-- including VanWyngarden's cherished techno thump, chopped up and submerged deep in the mix. Like most of MGMT, it's a million miles from anything resembling a straightforward song, nevermind a hit. It's mysterious, meandering, mesmerizing. And it's exactly what they wanted to create. The same goes for the rest of the album, a cornucopia of offbeat plinks and plunks, a mind-expanding deconstruction of what a pop song can be. There are twisted childrens' sing-alongs, molten sea chanteys, chewed-up space ballads, and one song called "Cool Song No. 2".

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Under a certain shadow, MGMT's intangibility suggests a slippery seriousness. Goldwasser says the whole album is about "accepting that the world is totally messed up, and the apocalypse is going to happen whether we want it to or not, and finding something beautiful to live for." But there are those giggly epiphanies, too. The sight-gag-filled video for first single "Your Life Is a Lie"-- with its talking dolphins, Whac-A-Mole, and murdered teddy bears-- is delightfully and shamelessly nutty. "Very few people put themselves on the line and say, 'OK, we’ve done something ridiculous, let’s roll with it,'" says Fridmann of the pair, admiringly.

This freewheeling attitude sounds ideal in the abstract, but in reality, MGMT's current strain of idiosyncratic music doesn't seem to stand much of a chance with the "Kids" kids. Their exploratory, constantly shifting brand of psych is meant for more adventurous music listeners-- a subset that has largely and somewhat unfairly written them off as, in VanWyngarden's words, "druggy, retarded, partying hipsters."

As a certifiably strange band on a major-label roster, MGMT could be seen as spiritual kin to the Flaming Lips. Talking about that band's latest Fridmann-helmed experimental assault, The Terror, Goldwasser says, with a mix of admiration and envy, "It’s nice that they’re able to do whatever they want at this point in their career and not get a lot of shit for it."

He also cites a less obvious influence: Canadian prog titans Rush, who he and VanWyngarden saw in concert last fall after watching a documentary on the band. "They made some embarrassing choices, but they never really cared," Goldwasser says. "They considered it a fluke that they were popular. They were just really into the music they were making, and they were always trying to push the envelope." He goes on to state similar aspirations: "We consider ourselves lucky that we're successful doing what we like doing. At this point, though, we’re not scared of losing anything. It was a fluke that these goofy songs we wrote in college were hits. We never considered the possibility that people would like them."

When it comes to expectations for their own success, MGMT have long operated under a low ceiling. The version of the band that existed while Goldwasser and VanWyngarden attended Connecticut liberal arts enclave Wesleyan in the early 2000s was not exactly a serious concern: The "concert" that led to independent label Cantora releasing their roughshod Time to Pretend EP consisted of the group and several friends sitting on stage in a circle, chopping open a particularly stinky durian fruit and passing it around.

A tour opening for fellow onstage button-pushers of Montreal followed in 2006, a noble achievement for a band with merely a handful of songs and a predilection for taping down individual keyboard notes to produce endless drones live. "It was basically karaoke-- they'd have an iPod plugged directly into the PA," touring drummer Will Berman remembers. "At one point, they had a guitar on stage, but it was hanging from a noose." A second leg of the tour involved ponchos and on-the-spot lyrics to songs that, according to VanWyngarden, sounded like a "combination of Creedence Clearwater Revival and Temple of the Dog. It was almost like we were trying to sabotage ourselves." (The tracks were eventually scrapped.)

The tour ended, and MGMT eventually ceased to exist. Goldwasser moved back home with his parents in upstate New York, while VanWyngarden considered joining of Montreal as a guitarist, going as far as to take promo photos with the band and agree on a full-time salary. He eventually turned the offer down and, against all odds, Columbia came calling on the strength of the Time to Pretend EP. It wasn't an easy yes, though, and MGMT as we know it may not exist if it weren't for some prescient fatherly advice. "Both of our dads were telling us, 'You’d be silly not to take this opportunity,'" VanWyngarden admits. "So we said, 'Here we go, let's see what happens.'"

A potent combo of healthy buzz, zeitgeist-capturing YouTube videos, and (most importantly) a few of the best psych-pop singles of the past decade made Oracular Spectacular a slow-building smash that went on to sell nearly 900,000 copies. The record was also a game-changer for Columbia, who used its success as a blueprint for expanding their stable to include other accessibly offbeat acts such as Cults, Passion Pit, and Chairlift. "MGMT built a bridge for a lot of groups to pass over," says Columbia chairman Rob Stringer. "They were one of the first in this new generation of bands to break the mold."

MGMT: "Kids" (via SoundCloud)

Things were moving fast, and VanWyngarden and Goldwasser struggled to keep up. "We had to be very gentle with them, because up to that point the band wasn't something they'd put any thought to," Stringer says. "They had to figure it all out." Producer Pete "Sonic Boom" Kember, who manned the boards during Congratulations, is slightly more blunt about the band's rapid ascent: "It was a case of 'be careful what you wish for,' only I don't think they ever wished for this."

A warning sign that the duo may be in over their heads involved a SPIN story from October 2008, which detailed a particularly tipsy night for VanWyngarden that began with a DJ set at a New York Fashion Week party and ended with the singer waking up on a stranger's couch after being thrown out of a homeless shelter.

"I have no regrets about that," VanWyngarden says now, matter-of-factly. "It was my own type of protest against having to DJ this awful rooftop party." He's sitting in the guest house behind his in-construction, two-story home near the beach in Far Rockaway, Queens. A crude drawing of what looks like a deformed version of Garfield hangs above the couch.

Despite VanWyngarden's now-pragmatic attitude about the incident, the article as a whole, which zeroed in on backstage debauchery and rumors of romantic entanglements with actress Kirsten Dunst, left MGMT feeling stung. "I didn't ever want the band to represent a debaucherous lifestyle," Goldwasser says. "That was the angle a lot of people used to describe us, and I hated it."

After touring behind Oracular Spectacular, VanWyngarden and Goldwasser decamped to a Malibu studio at the top of 2009 to work on Congratulations as a full band. "We would do a hundred takes of one keyboard part-- it got stressful," VanWyngarden says. "We were putting pressure on ourselves to get it done quickly, which stifled the creative juices a bit."

It wasn't all hair-pulling, though; while out on the West Coast, VanWyngarden learned how to surf (hence his current near-beachfront residence), and according to Black Bananas frontwoman and Congratulations contributing vocalist Jennifer Herrema, there were a few mushroom-tripping sessions, too. "It was super chill," says Herrema, whose seminal former act, 1990s scum-rock heroes Royal Trux, were a formidable influence on Goldwasser and VanWyngarden during their college days.

Herrema was drawn to MGMT after seeing the "Time to Pretend" video and still keeps in touch with them, recounting a recent hang session where a hallucinogen-fried Goldwasser marveled at the "psychedelic" qualities of maple syrup during a Monte Cristo-filled late-night diner run. "Their music is very different from the norm," she says. "If you have any kind of intuition, you know that what they're doing isn't bullshit."

MGMT: "Congratulations" (via SoundCloud)

Indeed, Congratulations cemented MGMT's reputation as musicians' musicians, a band unafraid to explore new territory when faced with the less risky option of sticking with a winning formula. A knotty left-turn of an album that has only grown more fascinating with time, it earned the band some well-reputed fans, from Animal Collective's Panda Bear to Deerhunter's Bradford Cox to Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter, who referred to it as his favorite album of 2010.

Non-musicians, however, weren't as besotted. Upon its release, Congratulations was met with mixed reviews and has sold 220,000 copies-- about 75% less than its predecessor. Even MGMT themselves played a role in feeding the sophomore-slump doomsday machine: in the fall of 2010, VanWyngarden told UK rag The Daily Record that Columbia would be "more involved" and "not give us as much freedom" with their third album. Goldwasser now claims the quotes were meant in jest, and that the duo's sarcasm didn't translate. "No one ever told us how to do press until recently," adds VanWyngarden. "We learned a big lesson."

Over the course of reporting this piece, that lesson became clear: Keep your head down and watch what you say. "They hate reporters," Fridmann tells me. "They're cloistered guys, and they don't let anyone close to them that they don't feel comfortable around." This becomes apparent backstage a few hours before the band's sold-out headlining gig at New Jersey's Wellmont Theater in June, when guitarist James Richardson lets out a harmless fart joke. I don't think twice about the casual small talk, but VanWyngarden sighs deeply. "Do you really want to be talking about farts in this article he's writing?" he says, gesturing in my direction. Richardson withers and immediately asks that his comments be stricken from the record; I push back, citing the ridiculousness of it all. Richardson withers again, and we move on.

Their growing level of suspicion is amusing, frustrating, and understandable, all at once; touring is a draining act, and it can make for heated tempers and bad attitudes. Plus, MGMT have earned an unfortunate reputation as a sub-par live act, so sensitivity abounds. "We wanted to carry on our ridiculous prankster vibe, but we also needed to play actual songs," VanWyngarden says, thinking back to the group's earliest misadventures in live performance. "We tried to take inspiration from the Grateful Dead by improvising over the songs," adds Goldwasser, who describes the band's Oracular Spectacular-era shows as "trial by fire-- some of the early live reviews said that we couldn't even play our own songs."

Five years later, MGMT are stronger, more confident, and much easier on the ears live. The songs actually sound like songs, as even the new album's most complex moments ring through with a muscular clarity. "We've started to build a real fanbase of people who are into the whole body of what we're doing," Goldwasser claims, citing recent performances at colleges. "It's not just a drunken party crowd that wants to get fucked up and have a good time."

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Based on the couple of gigs I attend, though, this audience analysis is wishful thinking: The Wellmont crowd is about as young-- though, admittedly, slightly less intoxicated-- than the headbanded upstate New York crowd. If VanWyngarden and Goldwasser continue following their most willfully weird tendencies, their greatest challenge ahead could be retaining an audience whose enthusiasm is most strongly connected to a version of the band that no longer exists. (MGMT have a two-album option left in their deal with Columbia, and label chairman Stringer says that, regardless of MGMT's pending sales performance, there's no plans to release the band from their contract early.)

Backstage at the Wellmont, VanWyngarden and a few band members flip through the venue's guest log while Goldwasser is onstage testing sound levels. After tittering at some of the more famous entries-- St. Vincent and David Byrne, Trent Reznor's How to Destroy Angels project-- they start tossing around ideas as to what to draw for MGMT's contribution. Among the suggestions: a cedar-plank salmon, some kale, "a guy who sort of looks like a frog," a dead mouse, an ant approaching the salmon "to provide a story arc." Wielding the pen, VanWyngarden settles on a plate of sunny-side-up eggs, hash browns, and bacon, with a dead mouse sitting on the edge, as garnish.

He continues working on the drawing right up to, and then after, the band's soundcheck. The page grows more cluttered with incongruous objects-- the frog-man hybrid, a squirrel huffing glue, confetti, a champagne glass, a car with "MGMT" emblazoned on the license plate. He stops briefly, widening his eyes as he surveys his work, and mentions to no one in particular that he's "kind of freaking myself out with this one."

Richardson enters the room, exposing a silver dollar-sized hole in his underwear as he leans over to check out VanWyngarden's drawing. "I think you need to start over," he says, with facetious concern. "Yeah," VanWyngarden replies, his voice trailing off. "It's gotten a little out of control." Then he keeps at it anyway.