"I'm feeling rough, I'm feeling raw, I'm in the prime of my life"
If ever you needed a lyric line to sum up the hipster nostalgia euphoria of the 2000s, the opening moments of MGMT's 'Time to Pretend' totally nails the brief.
The duo of Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden met and started messing around with song ideas while in College.
The project began as The Management, a telling jab at music industry bullshit.
They made dance-pop jams in their dorm room with stock loops on Ben's laptop, performing in friends living rooms wearing fur coats, drinking champagne and 'acting like fools'.
"It was kind of performance art in a way but it wasn't high concept," Goldwasser told Song Exploder.
That the project wasn't high concept likely worked in the duo's favour. In the process of their screwing around and trying to be 'ironic', these proto-hipster college kids unintentionally created three of the most effervescent, memorable pop hits of the noughties.
Over a decade on from their official release, 'Electric Feel', 'Kids' and 'Time To Pretend' are still automatic, irresistible dancefloor fillers. All three songs made the Top 20 in the Hottest 100 of 2008, and 'Kids' made Rolling Stone's list of the 100 best songs of the 2000s.
With the help of Flaming Lips/Mercury Rev producer Dave Fridmann, the duo filled out the rest of the album with bright, psychedelic gems that referenced early Bowie, The Kinks, The Flaming Lips and contemporaries, Of Montreal.
Van Wyngarden and Goldwasser might have heard joke rock star braggadocio, but fans heard infectious hooks, genre-twisting club-friendly bangers on one of the decade's defining debut albums.
