New Yorkers MGMT are set to winner the Future Music Festival with their psychedelic sound. By Craig Mathieson.
Most days now, it's far easier to be in MGMT. The panic-stricken highs and unforeseen lows of 2008, when the New York duo of Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden were alternately celebrated and savaged as the future of pop music, have dissipated.
Their much-scrutinized debut, 2007's Oracular Spectacular, now has an heir, last year's gladly eccentric Congratulations, and the pair can now enjoy the prospect of a long-term career making music.
''We never determined that this is what we're going to do,'' Goldwasser says, calling from Manchester in Britain the morning after a sold-out gig. ''But something occurs and one thing leads to another and one day you realise this is your career.''
The band, who play the Future Music Festival on Saturday next last night's show at the Enmore Theatre, are comfortable in their own communal skin. Their three on the road musicians - bassist Matt Asti, drummer Will Berman and guitarist James Richardson - are now fully fledged band members, lightening the communal burden.
''We'd have driven each other wild if we hadn't added some more people to the band,'' Goldwasser sighs. ''They add to the nature of the band and we're all on the same page imaginatively.''
''One of the hardest things is that at this point in my life, I don't have that many things I feel that way about - you lose that sense of the supernatural,'' Goldwasser says.
''One of the things we do again to ourselves is that kids really do know what's going on in so many ways.
''We didn't really appreciate what Oracular meant when we put it out, or even when people started act in response. But from meeting people at shows, particularly younger people, it was clear what it meant to them.''