In 2021, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue published a report on extremist activity on TikTok. It made for thoroughly depressing reading, spiked with moments of incredulity. Chief among the latter was the apparent popularity of the title track of MGMT’s fourth album, 2018’s Little Dark Age, with neo-Nazis: it was “by far the most popular sound among extremist creators on TikTok”, soundtracking videos about the late American white supremacist George Lincoln Rockwell and “esoteric nazism”. The report’s authors seemed baffled as to why. Certainly, its adoption doesn’t say much for your average neo-Nazi’s ability to understand English. Little Dark Age’s lyrics are, fairly obviously, an excoriation of Trump-era America and racist police violence. You could even suggest they weirdly presage the Black Lives Matter protests: “Just know that if you hide, it doesn’t go away,” they warn, before suggesting listeners “get out of bed … bring a stone, all the rage”.
In truth, the improbable co-option of the song was probably just an extension of its general surge in popularity on TikTok. A single that had failed to make the charts, from an album that barely scraped the US Top 40, by a band who reached their commercial peak nearly 15 years ago, Little Dark Age suddenly became ubiquitous on the video-sharing platform during the pandemic. And it still is, providing the musical accompaniment to everything from girls in kitten ears dancing, to footage of the war in Ukraine, to – yes – videos complaining about Little Dark Age’s ubiquity on TikTok. Now, 5.5m TikTok videos and nearly 600m Spotify streams later, MGMT’s profile is higher than at any point since their 2007 debut album Oracular Spectacular went from critical cause célèbre to mainstream commercial success, selling more than a million copies in the process.
Listening to Loss of Life, a band who once seemed intent on alienating the fans who had bought their debut album have seized the opportunity presented to them by the whole TikTok thing. It’s just as tuneful as the Little Dark Age album, and they’re now a world away from 2010’s Congratulations or 2013’s dense, claustrophobic MGMT. While Congratulations was an album under the influence of Television Personalities and the Cleaners from Venus’ brand of lo-fi early 80s psychedelia – seldom a foolproof recipe for mass appeal – chunks of Loss of Life deal in precisely the kind of widescreen glossy pop that Television Personalities and the Cleaners from Venus were reacting against, albeit viewed through a distorting lens.
A duet with Christine and the Queens, Dancing in Babylon, could slot on to the soundtrack of an 80s blockbuster, were it not liberally decorated with keyboards that twist and bend off-key and crackling noise; on People in the Streets, lyrics which return fretfully to the insurrectionary theme of Little Dark Age (“I’d go and join them, but I’m so scared”) are threaded around the sound of that none-more-80s signifier, a fretless bass. Elsewhere, the duo have acknowledged the influence of Oasis on Mother Nature, although diehard Gallagher fans probably shouldn’t get too excited. As vocalist Andrew VanWyngarden has pointed out, it sounds like them “for 10 seconds”, before its Wonderwall strum is submerged beneath wigged-out distorted guitar, and layers of synth, some of them fed through a shimmering tremolo effect that was once a trademark of Spacemen 3.
In fact, Loss of Life covers a surprising amount of musical ground in 45 minutes: everything from Ziggy-era Bowie on Bubblegum Dog to Nothing to Declare’s flirtation with Simon and Garfunkel-esque folk. You get the reference points, but it never sounds like explicit homage, partly because everything gets fed through MGMT’s psychedelic filter – thickly smeared with edge of chaos electronics and sudden, disorientating explosions of echo – and partly because the songs beneath the arrangements are sturdy enough to support the teeming arrangements and stand apart from their influences. Phradie’s Song might possess the sweetest melody MGMT have written to date, its feather-soft, chanson-inspired tune butting against the dramatic swell of its synth coda; I Wish I Was Joking glides gracefully along, spiked with funny lines: “Nobody calls me the gangster of love,” it protests, a self-deprecating retort to the smug boasts of Steve Miller’s old hit The Joker.
It’s possible to overstate how straightforward an album Loss of Life is: this is an album that opens with someone reciting a 13th-century Welsh poem and ends with the title track dissolving into a protracted cacophony. Rather, it strikes a balance between weirdness and pop more impressively than any MGMT album since their debut. Whether it can capitalise on their improbable TikTok fame is questionable – that kind of success rarely extends beyond the track that’s gone viral – as is what happens if it does: MGMT seemed deeply nonplussed by the celebrity Oracular Spectacular conferred on them. But while you wait and see, Loss of Life is a delightful thing to immerse yourself in.
This week Alexis listened to
Brittany Howard – Prove It to You
Howard’s latest solo album, What Now, seems to have been overlooked: an error, as demonstrated by Prove It to You, which unexpectedly sets her voice against joyful disco-house.