MGMT

By the time Andrew VanWyngarden and Benjamin Goldwasser started comparing record collections at Wesleyan, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's chilly, machine-pulsed synth-pop was already a generation old — but it was the record they kept coming back to. "Me and Ben always have had roots in synth-pop music since we met in college," VanWyngarden told the outlet The Music, listing OMD alongside Depeche Mode, Talking Heads, Madonna, and Prince as "the stuff you would expect." The debt stayed a private reference point for a decade, then surfaced by name on 2018's Little Dark Age, where VanWyngarden has said the track "Me and Michael" "pulls on OMD a whole lot."

listen: upstream & heresource: The Music — "Andrew VanWyngarden On The Reinvention Of MGMT" (Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark among MGMT's early synth-pop roots) ↗share

1979

ElectricityOrchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark

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2018

Me and MichaelMGMT

listen forPlay OMD's 1979 single "Electricity" against "Me and Michael" and the machinery underneath is the same even though the mood has changed: a pulsing, clipped bassline holding the track together while a bright synthesizer line rides on top of it. "Electricity" uses that pulse to sound urgent, almost like an alarm; "Me and Michael" borrows the exact same structure to carry a breakup story, the synth hook doing the emotional work a guitar solo might do elsewhere. It's the difference between a blueprint and the house built from it.

In February 2009, during a week the press later called "debauched," MGMT met Pete Kember in London — the co-founder of the psychedelic band Spacemen 3, who produces under the name Sonic Boom — and by the trip's end he'd agreed to fly to Malibu and produce their second album. Kember has called it "a big moment" in his own career; for MGMT it meant handing Congratulations to someone who had spent a decade building tape-drenched drone before either of them could drive.

listen: upstream & heresource: Vice — "MGMT Are Still Perfectly Strange" (Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark a touchstone; "Me and Michael" pulls on OMD; Spacemen 3 among their listening) ↗share

1989

Come Down EasySpacemen 3

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2010

Siberian BreaksMGMT

listen for"Come Down Easy" moves in a slow, reverb-soaked drone, guitars smeared until single notes blur into one shimmering wash — a band content to let a chord ring long past when a pop song would change it. "Siberian Breaks" borrows that patience across seven minutes, with more open space around each part — the philosophy Kember, its producer, has described himself: "When you have space in the mix, effects sound twice as good. You need half as much of them."

When Ben Goldwasser talks about Brian Eno, the language turns almost mystical. "It's a master/apprentice story," he has said. "Brian Eno is more of a sorcerer and I'm the student." The apprenticeship got literal in the studio for 2010's Congratulations, where the band kept a deck of Eno's Oblique Strategies — the aphorism cards he wrote decades earlier to jolt collaborators out of a creative rut — close at hand, before Goldwasser admits they "eventually started writing our own." The homage surfaced by name too: the album's title track, "Brian Eno," names a producer most of the band's listeners had likely never heard of, and means it as tribute rather than joke.

listen: upstream & heresource: More Dark Than Shark — MGMT on Brian Eno ("sorcerer" / apprentice; Oblique Strategies) ↗share

1978

Music for Airports: 1/1Brian Eno

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2010

Brian EnoMGMT

listen forEno's "1/1" barely commits to a shape at all — overlapping piano and synthesizer phrases drift in and out of alignment, built from tape loops of different lengths left to wander independently, so the piece never quite repeats itself. "Brian Eno" doesn't go nearly that far, but listen for the same refusal to sit still: a verse that never resolves into a proper chorus, a mix that keeps shifting which instrument sits up front, and an ending that drifts off rather than closing. It's a pop song still arguing with the idea of a pop song.