At some point in the last decade or so, public opinion, among those who still give thought to MGMT, began quietly shifting to accommodate the notion that they are a much stranger band than their career might initially have suggested. More than just one-album wonders who never recaptured the magic of their indelible early hits, or even misunderstood tinkerers who found the spotlight in a fluke accident and quickly retreated—though both descriptions are true enough—they are artists whose work addresses the very sort of glitzy mass appeal that those early hits still command. Even “Time to Pretend,” one of the singles that earned them slots opening for Paul McCartney and soundtracking the season finale of Gossip Girl, was itself a grimly funny satire of rock stardom. After two resolutely uncommercial follow-ups, one of which has since been reclaimed as a cult classic, 2018’s synth-poppy Little Dark Age was hailed in some corners as a return to form, a dubious honor that doesn’t quite cover that album’s own idiosyncrasies. Loss of Life is unlikely to face the same sort of mistaken identity.
MGMT’s fifth album, and first for the indie label Mom+Pop after an improbably long run on Columbia, shows no signs of a tightened budget. Nor does it scan as another retreat from whatever renewed attention Little Dark Age attracted. The production is slick as can be, and the songs aren’t shy about reaching for the rafters. But this time the big-tent sounds that Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden are refracting and subverting seem calibrated in part to challenge our notions of good taste: Britpop at its most bloated and bombastic, boy-band slow jams, songs that might have soundtracked the big kiss in a 1980s action-romance flick, or those that a formerly folky songwriter of the 1970s might have recorded while struggling to navigate the era of gated reverb and fretless bass. One track, the Christine and the Queens collaboration “Dancing in Babylon,” carries the unmistakable whiff of Savage Garden. Sometimes, they play these various highly specific idioms relatively straight. More often, they warp them like funhouse mirror images: the edges are still clean and precise, but the shapes they outline are all wrong.
Resurrecting old schlock in queasy new definition is not a novel pursuit in 2024. Loss of Life distinguishes itself through its use of this soft-rock accelerationist aesthetic to bolster the thematic punch of Goldwasser and VanWyngarden’s songs, which come across as equally awed and aghast at our era’s technological splendor and the crushing dehumanization it inflicts upon all but the most fortunate. Their palette of references serves a dual function: The arrangements’ gaudy spectacle reflects the feeling of life in a wonderland of convenience, entertainment, and alienation, even as their palpable sense of yearning earnestly suggests the possibility that love could help us to transcend this well-appointed hell we’ve made. At its best, this unification of sounds and ideas also serves to heighten the experience of these songs as songs, not only on the intellectual plane, but also in that more mysterious place, closer to our hearts, where we take stock of pop music’s innumerable variables, then subject their product, through a chain of involuntary and intuitive reactions, to one more-or-less binary judgment: Is it hitting or not?
“Mother Nature” is one of several songs on Loss of Life that succeed on both fronts. The vaguely dismaying buoyancy of its acoustic guitar and flutelike synths is temperamentally suited to a lyric that beckons us to “come take a walk with me down billionaire’s row/Trying to keep our balance over zero,” delivered cheerily enough to suggest that the sight of a few mansions will have the same beneficent effect on our constitutions as that of a sunrise over a lake. Just as importantly, those instruments provide the bedrock for melodies that are strong enough to stir you even if you don’t initially clock their irony.
Loss of Life’s most satisfying appeal to the mind and the spirit at once may be the instrumental bridge of “Nothing Changes,” a six-and-a-half-minute power ballad whose outlook at first seems as nihilistic as its title would indicate. VanWyngarden’s narrator seems trapped in an endless cycle of bad habit, much as we begin to feel trapped in the song’s endless cycle of solemnly strummed chords. But just after he insists for the umpteenth time that nothing’s gonna change, everything does: the musical key, the instrumentation, the feelings it all evokes. A French horn appears, then some space-age synths playing hip jazz harmonies, and suddenly we’re not in a power ballad at all, but a delightful bit of Bacharachian lounge pop, beamed in from some groovy alternate future or past. Life gets better, the song suggests, whether the guy singing knows it or not.
“Nothing Changes” is one of four or so power ballads on Loss of Life, depending on the expansiveness of your definition. That might not seem like a lot for an album with 10 songs. But the spirit of the power ballad, its search for a tempo slow enough and a drum fill huge enough to capture the whole of the human heart, pervades this music, even when it isn’t invoked explicitly. The form’s free intermingling of sincerity and artifice seems to appeal to MGMT on a literary or filmic level, the way a particular palette of syntax or color might appeal to a novelist or director for the way they illustrate their characters’ psychological states. But we tend to value pop music, more than other mediums, based on that binary evaluation of feeling. And jamming so many long, slow songs together risks making us feel a little bored. By the time of “I Wish I Was Joking,” the penultimate song and final power ballad, you may have crossed a threshold in your willingness to appreciate the music intellectually versus feel it viscerally. Though it sports a couple of genuinely laugh-out-loud funny lyrics—the conversational frankness of “Here’s the thing about drugs” as the first line of a verse; the allusive specificity of “No one calls me the gangster of love” as an entry in the subsequent list of downsides—the tune simply isn’t robust enough to support the plodding melodrama of its arrangement, no matter how smartly it conveys the narcissistic bathos of addiction.
It is illustrative of this tension that the strongest individual tracks on Loss of Life are those that depart from strict adherence to its overarching uncanny vibe. “Nothing to Declare,” a wistful psych-folk travelogue, and “Bubblegum Dog,” a candy-coated glam rocker, could have fit in as album tracks on Congratulations or Oracular Spectacular. Though they may not add as much to the sense of Loss of Life as a unified aesthetic statement unto itself, they’re just good songs, and seem likelier than the epic “Dancing in Babylon” or “People in the Streets” to end up in fans’ regular rotation.
And then there’s the album-closing title track, which charts weird new territory not just for MGMT, but in some small sense, for pop itself. I, for one, have never heard anything quite exactly like its admixture of icy electronics, “Penny Lane” brass-band fanfares, and demented parlor-dancing pizzicato strings. At the climax—why not?—a bruisingly distorted IDM breakbeat comes like unexpected thunder, nearly drowning out the rest. It’s like hyperpop, if you combined hyperpop’s everything-now internet-age immediacy with MGMT’s long-standing curiosity about record-shop flotsam from decades prior to that young microgenre’s earliest file backups. It feels, in some oblique way, like the inevitable conclusion of all those massive drum fills and syrupy synth pads, the apocalyptic transcendence at which they’ve always been pointing, only recognized as such with the moment of its arrival. It is, in other words, the perfect thematic conclusion to an imperfect album. And more to the point, it just hits.
