You can’t talk about MGMT without mentioning their experimental phase. Fresh off the high of 2007’s Oracular Spectacular, their first major-label album, and its three genre-defining singles, “Electric Feel,” “Time to Pretend,” and “Kids,” they released the unorthodox Congratulations and MGMT, which managed to squander all of their banked goodwill. To Rolling Stone, lead singer Andrew VanWyngarden confessed that most everyone wrote them off after MGMT. “They were like, ‘Oh, they have no pop juice left in them. It’s not happening again.’” Well, it is: On Little Dark Age, MGMT swing back to their synth-pop roots, and it sounds like no time has passed since the dorm-room brilliance of 2007.
This might be, in part, because Oracular Spectacular and Little Dark Age have both been shaped by periods of worldwide…