At the 2010 Grammys, MGMT was the hottest new band on the block. With a million sales of their 2007 debut album, “Oracular Spectacular,” a dance-pop single called “Kids” and a Grammy win, the New Yorkers could have used the ceremony to signal their arrival as mainstream pop stars. But when they rolled up on the pre-show carpet, it was clear they had other plans.
Decked out in wildly patterned suits, MGMT founders Andrew Van- Wyngarden and Ben Goldwasser gave a truly surreal interview with VJ Steven Smith. After trying to engage the band with pseudo-music talk to little avail, Smith gave up after two minutes, wearily complimenting their suits as a parting shot.
“Good tailor, by the way,” he said.
“Thanks,” replied a deadpan Van- Wyngarden. “His name is Swift.”
It was the kind of wonderfully uncomfortable moment music fans pray for during the Grammys. The off-the-cuff joke about the powers of pop princess Taylor Swift helped MGMT realize they may not be cut out for the Top 40 throne. “I don’t think our dry sarcasm and pranky style come across well in interviews,” VanWyngarden tells The Post.
Perhaps if they’d played nice during tedious TV chats and written another version or two of “Kids,” Van- Wyngarden and Goldwasser would have gone on to be as big as Swift herself. Instead, the Brooklyn bandmates have distinguished themselves by delving deep into the world of psychedelic rock: first with 2010’s head-expanding “Congratulations,” and now with a new, eponymous album, out Tuesday.
This musical departure has lost them plenty of fans; cynics often cite MGMT as a band that’s committed career suicide. But VanWyngarden doesn’t understand all the shade.
“We’ve been playing live since 2007 as essentially a psychedelic rock band, but people [heard our music on the radio and] came to our shows expecting Daft Punk!” he says.
“MGMT” was recorded in relative isolation in upstate New York. The immersive album is bathed in trippy noise and chaos, but delicate melodies hide below the surface, reminiscent of early Pink Floyd. The songs were mostly culled from hours-long jam sessions and improvisations between the bandmates.
“Sometimes we didn’t even know who was making what sounds,” laughs VanWyngarden. “It could be hit and miss, obviously, but when it clicked, it was like the sounds were coming from another dimension.”
Musically, the album is a world away from earlier MGMT hits, but the band’s subversive sense of humor remains intact. This summer, they performed the lead single “Your Life Is a Lie” on the “Late Show with David Letterman,” employing a comically oversized cowbell decorated with the words “Be Aware,” which VanWyngarden pounded with a giant drumstick. The bizarre performance became a viral hit. And on Wednesday, they turned up at “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” to play the track “Plenty Of Girls In The Sea” wearing film scuba gear and sitting around a goldfish bowl.
As Goldwasser says, the band wouldn’t trade the freedom to engage in that kind of mischief for another mainstream stint on the red carpet: “There’s not a whole lot of subtlety in that world. It’s all about surface appearances. We’re more about inside jokes and doing things that might take a little while to appreciate.”