MGMT - Inheritors of the head-expanding hippie ethos

MGMT's Kids put them on the map, but, if their latest album is anything to go by, their Glastonbury audience is in for something much more progressive. Nick Hasted hears why

Few of the bands playing Glastonbury's 40th anniversary this weekend fit the consciousness-expanding ethic of the festival at its best as well as MGMT. They remain best known for the joyous electro-psychedelic single "Kids", which has soundtracked everything from TV ads to President Sarkozy's election rallies (the band successfully sued). The album on which you can find it, Oracular Spectacular (2007), was named NME's album of the year and one of Rolling Stone's albums of the decade, on the way to selling more than 1.5 million.

But such 21st century commercial terms of success misunderstand Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden, the duo who began MGMT as an audience-baiting prank back at college in 2001. This year's follow-up album, Congratulations, ignored any attempt at "Kids 2", instead secreting the line "hope I die before I get sold" in its 12-minute, shape-shifting centrepiece "Siberian Breaks". It revealed the MGMT who had been typed as ironic, twentysomething paragons of pop pastiche to be serious inheritors of the 1960s tradition of mind-expanding music. Its mix of psychedelic drift and scattershot hooks is a natural, enjoyable development from Oracular Spectacular, and will go down a treat in the Sunday evening sun at Worthy Farm. But even this mild messing with a hit formula has seen Congratulations dubbed "career suicide" by many journalists. It doesn't help that when MGMT open their mouths, they have a habit of taking aim at their foot.

"We've always taken this approach to doing interviews that's super-casual and sarcastic and kind of self-deprecating," admits VanWyngarden, the more reserved and introspective of the pair, as he and Goldwasser eat lunch at a west London café.

"Looking back on those early interviews for this album, it was the wrong time, because it allowed journalists that had a preconceived notion of the sophomore slump to jump on it and be like, 'These guys don't even like the album that they made.'"

"Yeah, a lot of the reviews were hysterical and reactionary," says Goldwasser. "We were baffled at this career-suicide idea, like we'd made something to lose our fans to. We put so much effort into both our albums. It was so far from career suicide. What we really want is to establish ourselves so we can do what we want, and expand our audience's idea of what good music can be. But I think what confuses people is that we like to disguise meaning behind a lot of bullshit. We'll have moments where we're intentionally indulgent, or in bad taste. For us that's a way of knocking down preconceptions people have of what music should sound like. Why just go along with what's cool at the moment?"

"People freaked out when they saw there was a 12-minute track on the album," VanWyngarden sighs. "We feel like it's easy listening, or an extended folk song. It's not like some of the music we listen to, where they're just jamming, and some Japanese guy's making up his own language over it. Music used to be so much more ridiculous. Our music is so controlled and poppy compared to that. But I'm not worried. Things are fine."

MGMT's rebellious instincts were forged in isolated pockets of America. Goldwasser grew up in a small town in the Adirondacks mountains in upstate New York, five hours' drive from New York City, and a world away from any cultural action. "It's really idyllic," he recalls. "But I also felt like I wanted to escape. It was small-town America, before the internet and before there were 300 channels on television. Our town of 2,000 people was our world, and the neighbouring town of similar size was like a parallel universe. There wasn't much going on. It wasn't a place where you can figure out what kind of person you are, and there are cliques who are into 'that' kind of thing and wear 'that' kind of clothes. It was just hanging out with my weird friends, and making it up for ourselves."

At least some counter-cultural examples made it into Goldwasser's backwoods life. "There are a lot of old hippies who moved up there to live out their fantasy of getting away from the grime of the city. My parents were like that, living out their hippie lives. One of my good friends grew up on a commune, and I spent some time after high school living on one as well." Britain's post-punk, DIY scene of the early 1980s, such as Dan Treacy's Television Personalities (paid tribute to on Congratulations's "Song for Dan Treacy") and the Scouse psychedelia of The Teardrop Explodes and Echo and the Bunnymen were unlikely triggers towards his future musical life.

Listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time, he lay with his head between his stereo speakers in a classic pose of audio awe. "That was a huge moment for me," he remembers. "All the clichés of musical transcendence occurred then. I don't know if I left my body while I listened. I wish I could."

VanWyngarden, meanwhile, was growing up in Memphis, with a dad who'd been in a Southern bar-band. "I still listen to a ton of the classic music my parents played as I grew up – Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Talking Heads," he says, and that influenced the songs I connect with most. When I got to Wesleyan College, I loved the noisier, avant-garde bands, like Royal Trux [whose ex-singer Jennifer Herrema guests on Congratulations], who had a dirtiness, a grossness, like they were trash people. But I was still always drawn to the one song in their catalogue that's sweet and pretty."

"Industrial music was a really big influence on us too when we met at college," enthuses Goldwasser, "like Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV and Cabaret Voltaire, bands that go against any notion of what a song and music and pop should be – but insist that they are all those things, and act like it is. And it's not an act at all, there's nothing fake about it, they mean it. That's very inspirational to us."

The more they talk about their roots, the more clearly MGMT seem in a lineage with the musical and social visions that began in the late 1960s, when rock music was intended to expand minds, and even change the world. Do these two twentysomethings feel that's an unfinished project?

"I don't know if anyone still feels in their heart that the tactics and approaches of revolutionary hippies really work," Goldwasser considers carefully. "I think there is a thread that runs from some of the subliminal, transcendent moments that grew out of psychedelic music, up to the present. There are a lot of bands now who still believe in that. It's a tradition where you can see the torch being passed down. I would never assume that, 'Now the torch is being passed down to us.' But it is happening."

It isn't sometime commune-dweller Goldwasser who has followed these hippie trails the farthest anyway, but VanWyngarden. His fresh-faced, hip pin-up boy looks belie time spent reading acid guru Timothy Leary, among other consciousness-altering mavericks.

"I've only dabbled in that world," VanWyngarden says. "I was reading about consciousness shifts and dimensional shifts, and Terence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson, and strange things started happening and I backed off, it kind of scared me. It's something that I wanna go back to.

"When it comes to me being frustrated and searching for meaning, that's the direction I would go – within my own head. I've had little tastes of other worlds. We try to do that with our music a little bit. It's a scary thing. But it feels necessary." Does he think then that there are other dimensions that he can step into? "Yeah definitely. I think there are tons of different realities. Sometimes you can get there by psychedelic drugs. Music does it, or getting no sleep. Even meditating with friends. I don't think that's really that hard. It's just embarrassing to try. You start laughing, you feel like a dorky, New Age hippie. But I think that's the revolutionary, subversive thing that could be happening, if people did try."

Being afraid to step off into the unknown accounts for many of MGMT's dull indie peers, who have been only to happy to repeat past successes. Far from career suicide, Congratulations is the sound of a band creating their own future. Just don't ask them how.

"There are moments on the first album we jokingly blamed on aliens," admits VanWyngarden. "Like: 'Why are we signed to a major label? Why are we making these songs?'"

"We still use aliens as an excuse," says Goldwasser. "We get so involved making music, even we don't understand what we're doing."

MGMT play Glastonbury on Sunday. 'Congratulations' is out on Columbia