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Little Dark Age
Little Dark Age (abbreviated as LDA) is the fourth studio album by the American rock band MGMT, released on February 9, 2018, through Columbia Records. It was the band's first album of new material in over four years, after the release of their eponymous third studio album in September 2013.
After the band concluded touring at the end of 2014, members Andrew VanWyngarden and Benjamin Goldwasser took time off for most of 2015 before regrouping at the end of the year. The album was produced by the band with Patrick Wimberly and longtime collaborator Dave Fridmann. It features songwriting collaborations, a first for MGMT, with Wimberly, Ariel Pink and MGMT live band member James Richardson. It also features contributions from Sébastien Tellier and Connan Mockasin. Little Dark Age was preceded by the release of four singles: "Little Dark Age", "When You Die", "Hand It Over", and "Me and Michael".
The album received positive reviews from music critics, who saw it as a slight return to the pop style of the band's debut album, Oracular Spectacular. It peaked at No. 35 on the Billboard 200.
"The way we wrote [Little Dark Age] was a lot more like how we used to write in college. One of us would have an idea, or just send over chords, bass and drums, and then the other person would add another part or the next section. We built the songs like that."
When MGMT concluded touring at the end of 2014, Andrew VanWyngarden and Benjamin Goldwasser decided to take a short break from music and focus on their personal lives. VanWyngarden moved into a house in Rockaway Beach, Queens and Goldwasser moved to Los Angeles, California. Eventually, the duo regrouped at the end of 2015. VanWyngarden went out to Goldwasser's Los Angeles studio a few times and Goldwasser came back to New York to record at VanWyngarden's attic recording space. When they weren't visiting each other, the two would trade their ideas for songs by email. They initially decided to abandon the loose and improvisational writing style they employed on Congratulations (2010) and MGMT (2013) and revert to the creative method used with Oracular Spectacular (2007), where each member would come to their songwriting sessions with fully formed ideas. However, recording sessions weren't fruitful.
A turning point came when the band hired former Chairlift member Patrick Wimberly to help produce the album. The band has credited Wimberly with acting as an enabler for them, getting them excited when they had good ideas and encouraging them to go down the paths that he saw as promising. The song "James" came about after Wimberly and VanWyngarden took a large dose of LSD. Initially an unproductive session, a keyboard loop sent by Goldwasser inspired the two and the track was finished the same day. The song features VanWyngarden singing beneath his usual vocal range, which he prescribed to the fact that he had "spent hours screaming at the top of my lungs about Pakistan." Wimberly also encouraged the duo to invite musicians to collaborate on their songs. They opened their writing process up to others for the first time, with Goldwasser and VanWyngarden together having written the entirety of MGMT's original songs up to that point. MGMT hosted a two-week jam session, with various players stopping by and laying down tracks, and then edited and sorted through the recordings later. These sessions included drummer Josh Da Costa and James Richardson, a longtime member of the MGMT live band. The band also brought in Los Angeles native Ariel Pink and New Zealander Connan Mockasin. The band credited Ariel Pink with helping them relax and write on the spot. Pink had written lyrics on a piece of paper "in about four minutes", incorporating things they had just said in the hallway. Pink had VanWyngarden sing the lyrics, which he described as "liberating" to not spend days meticulously writing lyrics. Goldwasser agreed, saying, "Having someone like Ariel come over and show us that it was possible to do something spontaneous and off the cuff and still have it be meaningful was really inspiring for us, and necessary." The band had been writing through improvisation similar to how they wrote their previous album, MGMT (2013). Goldwasser described this breakthrough as a rediscovering of the "playfulness" and speed at which they wrote songs in the band's early days as students at Wesleyan University.
With Wimberly's help, the band eventually ended up with approximately 40 song ideas and a few complete compositions. In November 2016, they drove to and continued recording at Tarbox Road Studios in Cassadaga, New York with producer Dave Fridmann, who produced MGMT's debut album and 2013 self-titled album. They had hoped to record with Fridmann much earlier but delays pushed back their plans. They had begun recording with Fridmann and Wimberly at Tarbox in late September 2016. Instead of using distortion on an entire mix like before, Fridmann left a lot more room in the mix that helped the band achieve a less abrasive sound. The period of recording with Fridmann coincided with the 2016 United States presidential election, which heavily influenced the band. Goldwasser explained, "I think a lot of the things that we'd been hung up on, like questions of how do you be creative, what does it mean for us to express ourselves right now, what is an MGMT album in 2017 — all these dumb questions revealed themselves as dumb questions. We wanted to make songs that reflected how we were feeling in the moment, and we wanted to make something that was fun because we were in bad moods."
The album's cover artwork features an illustration by Jim Taber. It originally appeared in 1988 on the front cover of the first issue of Witness to the Bizarre, a literary horror and supernatural zine edited by Melinda Jaeb. The figure featured on the cover has been described as "a crude rendering of Edvard Munch's The Scream in clown makeup."
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Little Dark Age
Little Dark Age (abbreviated as LDA) is the fourth studio album by the American rock band MGMT, released on February 9, 2018, through Columbia Records. It was the band's first album of new material in over four years, after the release of their eponymous third studio album in September 2013.
After the band concluded touring at the end of 2014, members Andrew VanWyngarden and Benjamin Goldwasser took time off for most of 2015 before regrouping at the end of the year. The album was produced by the band with Patrick Wimberly and longtime collaborator Dave Fridmann. It features songwriting collaborations, a first for MGMT, with Wimberly, Ariel Pink and MGMT live band member James Richardson. It also features contributions from Sébastien Tellier and Connan Mockasin. Little Dark Age was preceded by the release of four singles: "Little Dark Age", "When You Die", "Hand It Over", and "Me and Michael".
The album received positive reviews from music critics, who saw it as a slight return to the pop style of the band's debut album, Oracular Spectacular. It peaked at No. 35 on the Billboard 200.
"The way we wrote [Little Dark Age] was a lot more like how we used to write in college. One of us would have an idea, or just send over chords, bass and drums, and then the other person would add another part or the next section. We built the songs like that."
When MGMT concluded touring at the end of 2014, Andrew VanWyngarden and Benjamin Goldwasser decided to take a short break from music and focus on their personal lives. VanWyngarden moved into a house in Rockaway Beach, Queens and Goldwasser moved to Los Angeles, California. Eventually, the duo regrouped at the end of 2015. VanWyngarden went out to Goldwasser's Los Angeles studio a few times and Goldwasser came back to New York to record at VanWyngarden's attic recording space. When they weren't visiting each other, the two would trade their ideas for songs by email. They initially decided to abandon the loose and improvisational writing style they employed on Congratulations (2010) and MGMT (2013) and revert to the creative method used with Oracular Spectacular (2007), where each member would come to their songwriting sessions with fully formed ideas. However, recording sessions weren't fruitful.
A turning point came when the band hired former Chairlift member Patrick Wimberly to help produce the album. The band has credited Wimberly with acting as an enabler for them, getting them excited when they had good ideas and encouraging them to go down the paths that he saw as promising. The song "James" came about after Wimberly and VanWyngarden took a large dose of LSD. Initially an unproductive session, a keyboard loop sent by Goldwasser inspired the two and the track was finished the same day. The song features VanWyngarden singing beneath his usual vocal range, which he prescribed to the fact that he had "spent hours screaming at the top of my lungs about Pakistan." Wimberly also encouraged the duo to invite musicians to collaborate on their songs. They opened their writing process up to others for the first time, with Goldwasser and VanWyngarden together having written the entirety of MGMT's original songs up to that point. MGMT hosted a two-week jam session, with various players stopping by and laying down tracks, and then edited and sorted through the recordings later. These sessions included drummer Josh Da Costa and James Richardson, a longtime member of the MGMT live band. The band also brought in Los Angeles native Ariel Pink and New Zealander Connan Mockasin. The band credited Ariel Pink with helping them relax and write on the spot. Pink had written lyrics on a piece of paper "in about four minutes", incorporating things they had just said in the hallway. Pink had VanWyngarden sing the lyrics, which he described as "liberating" to not spend days meticulously writing lyrics. Goldwasser agreed, saying, "Having someone like Ariel come over and show us that it was possible to do something spontaneous and off the cuff and still have it be meaningful was really inspiring for us, and necessary." The band had been writing through improvisation similar to how they wrote their previous album, MGMT (2013). Goldwasser described this breakthrough as a rediscovering of the "playfulness" and speed at which they wrote songs in the band's early days as students at Wesleyan University.
With Wimberly's help, the band eventually ended up with approximately 40 song ideas and a few complete compositions. In November 2016, they drove to and continued recording at Tarbox Road Studios in Cassadaga, New York with producer Dave Fridmann, who produced MGMT's debut album and 2013 self-titled album. They had hoped to record with Fridmann much earlier but delays pushed back their plans. They had begun recording with Fridmann and Wimberly at Tarbox in late September 2016. Instead of using distortion on an entire mix like before, Fridmann left a lot more room in the mix that helped the band achieve a less abrasive sound. The period of recording with Fridmann coincided with the 2016 United States presidential election, which heavily influenced the band. Goldwasser explained, "I think a lot of the things that we'd been hung up on, like questions of how do you be creative, what does it mean for us to express ourselves right now, what is an MGMT album in 2017 — all these dumb questions revealed themselves as dumb questions. We wanted to make songs that reflected how we were feeling in the moment, and we wanted to make something that was fun because we were in bad moods."
The album's cover artwork features an illustration by Jim Taber. It originally appeared in 1988 on the front cover of the first issue of Witness to the Bizarre, a literary horror and supernatural zine edited by Melinda Jaeb. The figure featured on the cover has been described as "a crude rendering of Edvard Munch's The Scream in clown makeup."