MGMT made their new album via email.
Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden have had a notoriously difficult relationship in the past and although they say that they are now in a better place, they prefer to work over email as Ben lives in Los Angeles and Andrew is based in New York.
Speaking to The Guardian about their new record ‘Little Dark Age’, Patrick Wimberly, who co-produced the record, explained: "They’re not attached to each other because of contracts or obligations. They’ve tapped into a connection that encourages them both to dig deep into their own ideas. At times it seems like they have their own language."
However, both Ben and Andrew are happy with their relationship at the moment.
Andrew said: "We’ve gone through different phases of hanging out and being, like, normal friends, and that’s not easy these days because Ben lives in LA. He’s got a dog with a backyard, and I’m in Rockaway and so we’re not like staying together and walking through parking lots like we were at college. We’ve gone through times where we had disagreements or it’s been tense. But we rode it out and it seems good now."
And the new record has been inspired by recent events in America.
Andrew said: "There’s a lot of stuff on the record relating to the last year. What Trump has done is just expose a whole lot of things that were there already. Like: is America bad? In ‘When You Die’, when we’re saying "I’m not that nice", it’s owning up to existing in a modern United States of America: you’re kind of part of this evil whether you want to be or not."
MGMT made new album via email
