Little Dark Age

MGMT spent most of 2015 apart, not making music, trading song ideas by email when they felt like it. Their previous album, a self-titled record from 2013, had been critically divisive and had not produced anything resembling the crossover success of "Kids" or "Electric Feel." By the time Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser regrouped in late 2015 and started working seriously on new material, they had shed the pressure of trying to replicate what their debut had done and were making music, as Goldwasser described it in an interview, for the feeling of making it. When they finished the title track they danced around the studio.

The album was recorded across sessions in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, and a studio in Cassadaga, New York, with producer Dave Fridmann, who had worked with them before, and Patrick Wimberly of Chairlift. It draws primarily from eighties new wave and synth-pop, not nostalgically but with the confidence of people who know exactly what they want these sounds to do. The Soviet constructivist imagery in the title track's video, Death stalking through a medieval dreamscape, was not a concept that required much justification in the context of 2017. VanWyngarden has described the record as expressing genuine surprise and dismay at the political and social climate they found themselves in.

"Little Dark Age" became one of the defining songs of TikTok's early years, introduced to a generation of listeners years after its release through clips that captured exactly the song's specific flavor of gothic absurdism. The album it comes from is ten tracks of meticulous, coldly beautiful pop music that rewards the patience required to get inside it.