"This does sound whack to say now, but drugs are bad'

Nearly 20 years after releasing their coming-of-age anthem 'Kids', MGMT are enjoying a surge in popularity. The pair speak to Mark Beaumont about snubbing success in the Noughties, streaming, TikTok and leaving partying behind

The charm of Saltburn strikes again. After Sophie Ellis-Bextor found herself reborn as a global darling in the wake of Barry Keoghan giving his undercarriage a flamboyant airing to “Murder on the Dancefloor”, it is now MGMT’s turn to reap the Salt-sync rewards.

“[Debut single] ‘Time to Pretend’ was used in that movie and somehow from that it turned into a TikTok trend,” says multi-instrumentalist Ben Goldwasser, clutching a white-flecked beard down Zoom, still bemused by online events. “I think that’s maybe our top streaming song at this point… It’s pretty wild.”

It’s not the Connecticut (via NYC) psych-pop band’s first TikTok rodeo. Out of nowhere in 2020 Goldwasser and bandmate Andrew VanWyngarden – the uncompromising duo behind the Noughties’ most cosmic dancefloor hits “Time to Pretend”, “Electric Feel” and “Kids” – unexpectedly racked up 600 million streams of their 2018 electro-noir track “Little Dark Age” after it was adopted as a trending sound on the platform.

Overnight it seemed these psych-pop Becks, who had seemingly fallen off the radar and into a fathomless black hole of sonic weirdness for the past decade, were granted a new lease of life. “It just feels like a continuation of the absurdity of our existence as a band,” Goldwasser says, “We’re just doing our thing and these things just kept coming to us. Now it’s like lightning just struck twice.”

“They’re like blessings from the Lord,” VanWyngarden laughs. “At times we’ve actively tried to find ways to break away from these three songs that we wrote when we were in college. It seems like we confused people by not trying to recreate those songs, ever.”