MGMT Desire New Songs

When Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden started making music together in university, fame and fortune were the last things they were looking for. MGMT's earliest shows were noisy electronic experiments that explored territory like remixing the Ghostbusters theme song for an hour.

A few years and several hiatuses later, the two are now travelling the world in a five-piece rock band on the heels of their major label debut, Oracular Spectacular.

"We were pretty much convinced that nobody would hear our album and that we'd just fade into obscurity," says Goldwasser, from the grounds of their latest tour stop, the U.K.'s Leeds Festival. "Or never emerge from the obscurity in the first place.

"We played in Reading last night. It's our last summer festival, really. We're going home for a little while, and then we tour with Beck in September."

MGMT's current jaunt took them as far as Japan where, Goldwasser says, they received a surprisingly large turnout.

"I don't know how many people [were there], but it was a pretty big crowd. It's always kind of hard for us to imagine that people have heard about our band in places like Japan."

Playing shows in support of an album has taken some getting used to for Goldwasser and VanWyngarden. Catering to fans that want to hear specific songs is a far cry from their days as impromptu experimenters. They've been extending songs and learning covers to try and spice up their live set, but Goldwasser can see a day approaching where MGMT will need to trot out some new songs in order to keep things interesting — more for themselves than admirers.

"Our attitude is not to really make any decisions involving the band just in order to win over more fans or be more accessible. We're not afraid to alienate people who don't get what we're doing at the moment. We're getting really excited to have at least another album worth of songs to play live and not have to play the same thing every day."

Here's where you can catch MGMT in Canada:

Sept. 6 Toronto, ON @ Toronto Island Park (Virgin Festival)
Oct. 5 Toronto, ON @ Sound Academy w/Beck
Oct. 6 Montreal, QC @ Theatre St-Denis w/Beck