photo by Eric Uhlir

MGMT, for those who've somehow missed the boat, has experienced quite the rocketship to notoriety. On the shoulders of a very solid debut album, Oracular Spectacular, the youthful duo of Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser has gone from the dormitories of Wesleyan University to opening up for the likes of Beck and Of Montreal, appearing on Conan O'Brien and David Letterman, and winning a legion of partisan fans for their unique brand of updated '70s psych-rock. In light of MGMT's upcoming ACL performance Saturday (AT&T Blue Room Stage at 5:30), we got frontman and taco-connoisseur Andrew VanWyngarden on the horn for an impromptu discussion of this, that, and the other.

So you guys have had a hell of a year?

It’s been pretty busy.

We caught you guys live for the first time at Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin last year.

Oh, wow. That was one of our first shows playing with the five-piece.

You were playing early in the day and there were about thirty people in the audience, and three months later you’re on Letterman.

It’s weird, man.

So your press material says you’re down with spirituality and paganism—what exactly do you guys believe in that realm?

It’s not a big part of our band philosophy, but I was reading some kind of New Age philosophy books and conspiracy theory stuff and 2012 stuff when we were writing the album. The pagan thing is pretty much a joke, we’re not super paganistic dudes—we don’t have rituals or sacrifice things. I don’t know, we’re spiritual in a way, but everything we do is in a way serious and not serious. We change our minds all the time and change our style and what kind of music we want to play. It’s weird because we have this bio that has something about psychic pilgrims and paganism, but that was just something this guy wrote and we thought it was cool, but…haha, we’re not really spiritual dudes.

There’s always those pictures of you with the paint on and the feathers.

That’s really all from our video shoot from “Time to Pretend,” and the style for that shoot was kind of tribal and post-apocalyptic, but we don’t dress like that all the time, or at our shows or anything. But we kind of got pigeonholed as this psychedelic hippie, pagan thing, but really we’re just slackers who like to smoke pot...James is a huge pothead.

[voices and laughing in the background].

No, I’m just kidding. They’re saying "don’t talk about smoking pot." But we’re not just stoners. We’re deeper than that. We’re not just hippies. But we’re also a lot shallower than that.

If there was some sort of view you would want people to have, as opposed to the whole mystic thing, do you know what that would be?

Not really—maybe that we’re more like pranksters and a little bit more sinister than people realize. We kind of have this big plan of somehow infiltrating mainstream culture and messing with people and now that we’ve gotten in, we can do this fun stuff. But people can think of us what they want. I think it’s great people think we’re hippies because pretty soon we’re going to commit acts of terror.

That’s awesome. And it is weird that you guys are on the inside now—you know how Lou Reed put out that album, Metal Machine Music, that made no sense at all to anybody? Do you see you guys doing something like that, just saying “Ha Ha” to everybody?

We don’t want to blow it yet, but we have that in our arsenal if we need it. But we want to make music we really like and that we’re proud of, and the label hasn’t done anything to mess with us…

To inspire your wrath?

Yeah—everything is cool right now. We’re not going to make some bluegrass, Indian album.

As far as that next album is concerned, have you guys started working on anything for that?

We have lots of song ideas, and we’re going to be in a house as a band out in the countryside recording and demoing starting in January. It think we’re all really excited for it.

You guys used to tour with Of Montreal, and that sort of helped you guys get going. What do you think of the fact that they’ve gotten sort of super crazy huge this past year?

I think it’s great for them. I like the music that Kevin makes, and I think it’s crazy that he can be as freaky and as bad as he wants to be. He can do whatever he wants and people love it. They’re live shows are really insane, lots of visual production and stuff like that. I think it’s cool. I’m happy for him.

As far as your live performance is going, what’s the difference between playing a show now and playing a show a year ago, beyond the much larger crowds?

We’re definitely much more comfortable on stage…and better at our instruments. We know each other better as musicians, and are playing the music a lot better. That’s probably the main difference.

Are you playing any new stuff on tour now, or is it all Oracular Spectacular?

We’re playing this fourteen-minute B-side that we wrote, called "Metanoia," and we’re playing a cover of this song by this band Laid Back.

Okay, Andrew, I hate to ask, but I have to ask you this one question. If you google your name, half of the results are in relation to this…people are really obsessed with who you’re dating? That must be pretty strange. So what the hell’s with this whole Kirsten Dunst thing?

Dude, I don’t know. That was just a weird rumor—I think she’s been at a couple of our shows, and then some guy, some reporter in London kind of just made up this whole article that we were dating. And it spread like crazy. Ben and I were never really trying or expecting to enter that world. We’d much rather have people talk about the music and the live shows and stuff. So it’s kind of annoying.

Yeah, it’s personal life stuff.

Yeah, it’s really strange to have a lot of people discussing very personal things. It’s just freaky.

I’ll tell the British not to do it anymore.

[laughing] Yeah, good luck with that!

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