Indie pop duo MGMT are all grown up: ‘This sounds whack to say now, but drugs are bad’
The charm of Saltburn strikes again. After Sophie Ellis-Bextor found herself reborn as a global darling in the wake of Barry Keoghan giving his undercarriage a flamboyant airing to “Murder on the Dancefloor”, it is now MGMT’s turn to reap the Salt-sync rewards.
“[Debut single] ‘Time to Pretend’ was used in that movie and somehow from that it turned into a TikTok trend,” says multi-instrumentalist Ben Goldwasser, clutching a white-flecked beard down Zoom, still bemused by online events. “I think that’s maybe our top streaming song at this point… It’s pretty wild.”
It’s not the Connecticut (via NYC) psych-pop band’s first TikTok rodeo. Out of nowhere in 2020 Goldwasser and bandmate Andrew VanWyngarden – the uncompromising duo behind the Noughties’ most cosmic dancefloor hits “Time to Pretend”, “Electric Feel” and “Kids” – unexpectedly racked up 600 million streams of their 2018 electro-noir track “Little Dark Age” after it was adopted as a trending sound on the platform.
Overnight it seemed these psych-pop Becks, who had seemingly fallen off the radar and into a fathomless black hole of
