• Tweet

Photo Credit: Danny Clinch, Rolling Stone

One of indie music’s favorites are back: Rolling Stone has just confirmed the duo MGMT have been working on their new album! Yes, one of the most highly anticipated projects of recent memory, their new, still not yet named, third release is the follow up to 2010′s Congratulations. Their sophomore album was a slump, it was so bad that label execs were rumored to sit in on the making of the new record. “People thought we took too many drugs, which was not the case at all,” says Ben Goldwasser to Rolling Stone.  I would personally agree with that, which would probably help explain why that record sucked so bad. Or perhaps it was the change: their first was made with just the two of them, and the second added more musicians to the original mix.  Instead of using their live band, as they did on Congratulations, “the core duo recorded alone, cherry-picking the best parts of their free-form jams to construct tracks that reflect the Aphex Twin and house records they’ve been listening to lately. Says Goldwasser, ‘We’re not trying to make music that everyone understands the first time they hear it.’”

“Despite a U.K. press report to the contrary, the duo say their label, Columbia, hasn’t pressured them to make a more accessible record this time. ‘There’s no illusion on their part that we’re going to turn into a Top 40 band,’ says VanWyngarden. ‘That’s kind of comforting.’”

According to the article, which is from the February 14th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone, the founding members have spent most of last year alone in a cabin near Buffalo,NY, working on the new album. “Nearly every corner of every room is stuffed with keyboards, drum machines and guitars. For hours on end, the duo of Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser program synth loops in one room, then run next door to trigger another sequence, until the entire house is vibrating with spacey, rhythmic music. ‘We’ll get involved in what we’re doing,’ says Goldwasser, ‘and the next thing we know, we’ve been improvising for five hours.’”

Due out in June, “swirling electronic highlights include ‘Mystery Disease’ and ‘Alien Days’ – which VanWyngarden explains is ‘about that feeling when a parasitic alien is in your head, controlling things.’ They also recorded a version of ‘Introspection,’ a mega-obscure Sixties garage rocker by the Long Island cult band Faine Jade. ‘The recording process was really strange,’ says co-producer Dave Fridmann. ‘So we did a cover just to say, ‘Let’s get back to planet Earth for a second.’”

Via Rolling Stone