MGMT Return! Psych-Pop Duo Tease Cosmic New Single, "Alien Days"
MGMT are officially in new album promo mode.
The Brooklyn duo have wrapped the still untitled follow-up to 2010's Congratulations, set to drop in June, and are hitting the road next week for a spring tour. And now Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden have offered the first taste of their weird, synth-heavy new sound with a video preview for "Alien Days," which will drop this Saturday as a special Record Store Day cassette single. Watch the stop-motion video teaser, starring the cassette itself and a sock puppet driving a car into the cosmos.
In a recent Rolling Stone report, VanWyngarden explained that "Alien Days," which will also feature on the LP, is "about that feeling when a parasitic alien is in your head, controlling things." Inspired by Aphex Twins and house music, the new album was recorded over the past year (with many, many synths, keyboards and drum machines) at producer Dave Fridmann's Tarbox Road Studios in upstate New York. There's also a song called "Mystery Disease" and a cover of "Introspection" by the 1960s garage rockers Faine Jade.
And it sounds like the new album is super-psychedelic: "The recording process was really strange," Fridmann said. "So we did a cover just to say, 'Let's get back to planet Earth for a second.'" Goldwasser added that MGMT are "not trying to make music that everyone understands the first time they hear it... There's no illusion on [Columbia Records'] part that that we're going to turn into a Top 40 band."
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