MGMT have entered the golden age of not giving a damn about what anyone else thinks. The American duo, made up of uni friends Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, drop their fifth album, Loss of Life, this month, and they’re doing it their own way. “I don’t think we’re burdened as much by self-consciousness or worrying about pleasing other people,” Andrew says over Zoom.

Loss of Life is MGMT’s first album for an independent label, and that freedom radiates from these songs. The band put it down to growing older – both members are now in their forties – and generally caring less about the expectations of others. “We’re finally able to lighten up about this in a way that we hadn’t been able to before,” says Ben. “When we were younger, there was a sense of things being more carefree or indulgent and spontaneous, but at the same time, we were feeling a lot of anxiety and pressure, and feeling like we had to get everything right. We were really hard on ourselves, and I think we’re at a point now where we can get more to the point, but we also are not taking ourselves nearly as seriously.”

Its title might suggest otherwise, but Loss of Life is deliberately all about optimism, in contrast to the band’s last album, 2018’s Little Dark Age, which explored anxiety, paranoia and despair. “We’ve made a point of trying not to focus the subject matter on how bleak everything is in reality,” Ben says. “Imagining a better world or a situation where we can feel joy and connection to each other is a good first step.”

Having time to decompress during lockdown helped the pair come into this new phase of their decades-long collaboration. With the constant cycle of touring on hold, they had the luxury of creating purely for the fun and love of it. “It’s really good for us,” says Andrew. “There are things that I think we’ve been talking about doing for 10 or 15 years, and now we finally have a moment where we can start actually realising some of these desires.”

It also means that there’s less rigidity about what their music has to sound like. “In the past, we would have made something and then been like, ‘Is this MGMT? Can this be MGMT?’ or ‘This doesn’t sound like MGMT and we don’t really do that’,” Andrew says. “Now it is MGMT because it’s us, and that makes things easier.”

The proof is all in this album’s eclectic influences, from Japanese city pop to Oasis, and instruments including horns and fretless bass. “We’ve done so many different things that at this point it feels like we don’t have to prove to somebody that we can also do other styles of music,” Ben says.

On this record, MGMT also invites a guest artist into the fold for the first time ever: French pop singer Christine and the Queens lend vocals to the duet “Dancing in Babylon”. “That song went through all sorts of different phases – it really evolved from one very different thing to where it is on the album,” Andrew says. “The song sort of took a turn to a more ’80s romantic kind of thing, and Chris’s voice was instantly something that I thought would work.

“Most of the collaboration we’ve done is where we’re the ones featured as singing or remixing or doing something on someone else’s song – it felt good to bring people onto our own music and I’m sure we’ll do more of that.”

Even though their music and the way they approach making it are evolving, Andrew and Ben are well aware that for many listeners, MGMT is the defining sound of a certain time and place – songs like “Kids”, “Electric Feel” and “Time to Pretend” soundtracked the late noughties.

There’s a real sense of nostalgia for that time, and the band is perfectly happy to lean into it. They played their first live show in four years in 2023 at the Californian indie nostalgia festival Just Like Heaven, performing their 2007 debut album, Oracular Spectacular, in full. The show included papier-mâché bobblehead figures of their younger selves and they sampled recordings of their old demos and songs, linking past to present. “Our earliest and most popular songs felt like we were tapping into a nostalgic feeling at the time but it was more nostalgic for childhood, and now there’s a nostalgia for that, so it’s like a layer cake of nostalgia,” Andrew says. “I think nostalgia has always been a big component of our music and our story.”

It’s serendipitous timing with the “indie sleaze” trend making the rounds. The pair admits it’s a little surreal to see themselves tagged in posts romanticising the era when at the time, they were largely mucking around. “Some of the outfits I was wearing back then, I was just wearing as a complete joke because I thought it was so ridiculous – it wasn’t something that I thought was cool at the time,” Ben says. “To have that be a snapshot in time is very absurd to me. But I enjoy it – I think it’s really funny.”

But the biggest full-circle moment came when the band was rehearsing for their live comeback in Los Angeles, and walked into a bar where people in their early 20s were “dancing ironically” to music from 2007 – including MGMT. “I had this shock when I realised that we were doing that when we were that age to Hall and Oates, and it was the same time difference,” Andrew laughs. “So we’re like the Hall and Oates to some people now – that is really wild.”

This interview comes straight from the pages of issue 118. To get your mitts on a copy, swing past the frankie shop, subscribe or visit one of our lovely stockists.