The Massively Popular (and Electric) Indie Band From the Late 2000s That Started as a Prank

Of all the indie bands to come out of the late 2000s, few captured the synth-laden nostalgia of the decade like this massively popular indie band that started as a prank. Even if you don’t know the songs by name, you’ve heard them. And if you were in the target audience for the half-rebellious, half-wistful music that permeated the indie market of the 2000s and 2010s (like this writer), these songs likely stayed on repeat on your iPod nano.

But for the two men behind the music that ended up defining an entire decade, their songs—whether “Kids” or “Electric Feel” or otherwise—were more farce than fun.

This Popular Late 2000s Indie Band Started As a Prank

Wesleyan University students Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden founded MGMT during their freshman year at the liberal arts college in Middletown, Connecticut. After bonding over a mutual love of new wave, noise rock, and their fair share of psychedelic drugs, the two friends started making music that satirized “popular” music of the time.

During one of their first live performances, Goldwasser and VanWyngarden donned giant snowman costumes and played the Ghostbusters theme for a whopping 45 minutes. (Honestly—just imagine hitting the 10-minute mark and realizing that the band is showing no signs of stopping. Who you gonna call, you know?) According to Goldwasser, they started their anti-band “to f*** with people by making the poppiest music imaginable that we thought was really stupid. We really didn’t consider ourselves a band. We were more interested in pulling pranks on people.”

The only problem with their “prank” was that people did really like their music. MGMT started making the “poppiest music imaginable” at the exact moment that poppy indie rock was starting to dominate the mainstream music scene. Indeed, if Goldwasser and VanWyngarden had met ten years earlier or ten years later, they very well might have enjoyed the tongue-in-cheek obscurity they initially sought.

How The Decades’ Biggest Hits Came About on Accident

Andrew VanWyngarden recorded a six-track EP, Time to Pretend, which included future hits like the EP’s title track and the equal parts dancey and nostalgic “Kids.” Goldwasser told Pitchfork the latter track fell out when he was in “a weird mood, drunk at 3 am by myself. I wasn’t trying to write music that people would like.”

Of course, people did. When the suits at Columbia Records caught wind of this synthy, dream-poppy duo out of Connecticut, they offered the should-have-been satirists a record deal. “We weren’t really looking for a label,” Goldwasser told Interview magazine. “We had no intention of getting signed; we were on a really tiny indie label that some friends started. Even up until the moment we signed the record deal—like, when we were talking to people at Columbia Records—we totally didn’t believe that a big label was actually talking to us seriously about our music.”

MGMT’s popularity skyrocketed with the 2007 release of Oracular Spectacular, dominating indie and mainstream airwaves alike. The band has continued to release music in the years since to varying degrees of success, although no album has proven capable of living up to their debut’s meteoric rise to fame. But hey—maybe that’s just the music industry pranking them back.

Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Firefly