MGMT – ‘Loss Of Life’ review: the duo remain relevant and potent

When it was time to make their fifth album ‘Loss of Life’, MGMT were armed with some quantifiable assurance that yes, people still cared. Throughout the first early stages of the pandemic, the title track to their 2018 album ‘Little Dark Age’ had become a TikTok and streaming smash, notching nearly 600 million plays on Spotify; it also spawned videos from millions of users – some of whom too young to remember when the psych-pop duo exploded with 2007’s ‘Oracular Spectacular’. “I think in a way that freed us up a little bit on this record to just focus on the music,” the band’s Andrew VanWyngarden recently explained. “Don’t worry about the other stuff and whatever happens, happens.”

Compared to many of their Tumblr-era contemporaries – including a few who also enjoyed a sync in Emerald Fennell’s decidedly-2007 period piece Saltburn – MGMT’s character arc plays out like an inverted bell curve. Bands like Weezer were covering ‘Kids’ not long after its release, but somewhere between 2010’s ‘Congratulations’ and its 2013 self-titled follow-up, it seemed MGMT had burned out.

But what ‘Little Dark Age’ proved – and what their new album ‘Loss of Life’ cements even further – is that all of VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser early-career dreams of becoming true rock stars has come true, and they’re doing their best to make the most of it as they look back on themselves. ‘Loss of Life’ opens with ‘Part 2’ of its title track, as if to establish from the start that this album is meant to be looked at through the rear-view; on the following song, the Magical Mystery Tour-reminiscent ‘Mother Nature’, VanWyngarden posits that “you know what comes right after the dark”. You can almost hear his thoughtfully raised eyebrow, well aware of all the distress he’s about to bring into the light.

It would be easy for a band like MGMT, who initially made their name off anthems about living fast and dying young, to stick with a similar schtick. But on ‘Loss of Life’ – which, it’s worth noting, is the band’s first album not on a major label – they’re interested in some more complex introspection: What happens after you’ve gone to Paris, shot some heroin, and fucked with the stars? “I can tell the pearl’s in there / And still, there’s nothing I can find,” VanWyngarden sings on the acoustic guitar number ‘Nothing to Declare’ likening his unfulfilling rock star encounters to the soulless souvenirs you might list on an airport customs form. On the sophisti-pop Christine and the Queens duet ‘Dancing in Babylon’ VanWyngarden wonders: “Don’t you miss feeling like you could run away/ And nobody had to know?” It doesn’t feel like he’s trying to hark back to childhood as much as he’s pining for a sense of freedom, and ‘Loss of Life’ toes the line between wanting to be extraordinary and wanting to be nothing at all.

But MGMT maintain that ‘Loss of Life’ isn’t an entirely sad or nihilistic record. Though it trades the psychedelic synth-pop of ‘Little Dark Age’ for a more simplified, ‘70s singer-songwriter approach, the concept of love returns as one of the band’s guiding tenets: “I felt hate toward the earthly world / But hate is a very strong word / And it’s finally catching up with me,” VanWyngarden proclaims on ‘Bubblegum Dog’, the album’s noisy, whimsical centrepiece. ‘Loss of Life’ is imbued with just enough sweetness that by the time it reaches its overarching message – “nothing prepares you for loss of life” – it doesn’t just make you want to prepare yourself, it makes you excited to do so.