MGMT: Head Games

Photographs by Nick Haymes

Meanwhile, Maureen Kenny, an A&R rep at Columbia Records, was trying to track them down. An intern had slipped her the EP, which Kenny couldn't stop listening to. When she finally found them and brought them to Manhattan's Peninsula Hotel for some old-fashioned wining and dining, Kenny recalls, "They ordered the most expensive drinks -- $24 Bellinis -- and Andrew asked if they'd get fur coats. And then they e-mailed me a dream list of producers that included Barack Obama and 'not Sheryl Crow.' "

Their sincere choice was Dave Fridmann, who sprinkled similar stardust on the Flaming Lips. VanWyngarden and Goldwasser spent the winter of 2007 writing new tunes and recording demos, which Fridmann passed on to the Lips' Wayne Coyne. ("We listened thinking, 'What do they need a producer for?' " Coyne recalls. "They already knew what they wanted.") When it came time to record at Fridmann's Tarbox Road Studios in bucolic Cassadaga, New York, the duo played every instrument, as they later did on the recently released 14-minute single "Metanoia." "They have this twin-style communication between them," Fridmann says. "Their musical discovery is happening really quickly; they're just plowing through."

The process wasn't without bumps, however. Lines like "We're gonna keep you on the run / We got the handshake under our tongue" on "The Handshake," one of Oracular Spectacular's darker songs, betray reservations about even signing with Columbia. "The handshake is the deal," VanWyngarden says. "I was thinking about a mental asylum, when a patient tricks the nurse by keeping the pills under his tongue, then spits them out when she walks away."

Read the entire MGMT feature in the Nov. 2008 issue of SPIN, on newsstands now.