Listen to MGMT’s New ‘Little Dark Age’ Album
It's taken its sweet time getting here, but MGMT's long-awaited fourth album is finally here for fans' listening pleasure.
Little Dark Age, the band's follow-up to 2013's MGMT LP, finds creative partners Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser emerging from a lengthy period of writer's block that contributed to the long layoff between releases. As the duo told Uproxx, the 2015 writing sessions that led off the prep work for Little Dark Age "didn't go anywhere" — the byproduct of a creative crisis of confidence.
"We had that when we were writing our most popular songs,” VanWyngarden recalled of the confident spirit that fueled earlier efforts. "We were like, ‘Oh, this is so stupid.’ It’s not like the songs were a joke, we were just like, ‘This is bullshit.’ Most of my song ideas, when I’m trying stuff at home, the word ‘bullshit’ is in the title."
If lightening up helped loosen the creative logjam, VanWyngarden and Goldwasser were still inspired by serious events — specifically the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which they observed with a mixture of disbelief and clarity. As Goldwasser pointed out, the high-stakes nature of the campaign underscored how little they really had to lose.
"I think a lot of the things that we’d been hung up on, like questions of how do you be creative, what does it mean for us to express ourselves right now, what is an MGMT album in 2017 — all these dumb questions revealed themselves as dumb questions," Goldwasser explained. "We wanted to make songs that reflected how we were feeling in the moment, and we wanted to make something that was fun because we were in bad moods."