“We were shocked,” Goldwasser says. “They were the first people who thought of us as a real band—we definitely didn’t.” After releasing the Time to Pretend EP in January 2005, they celebrated their graduation that summer by touring with fellow glam oddballs Of Montreal. But rather than capitalize on this momentum, MGMT simply ceased to be—Goldwasser stayed in Middletown for six months before spending a summer building eco-friendly straw-bale houses near the Catskills, while Van Wyngarden landed in Brooklyn, living with a girlfriend and only sporadically looking for jobs on Craigslist. By fall 2006, Goldwasser moved to Brooklyn as well, but pursuing the band further wasn’t a priority.

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. Van Wyngarden 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,” Van Wyngarden 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.”

 

he day after the Holt Renfrew party, under steely gray skies, MGMT and company leave the hotel in a van for their gig at Toronto’s Virgin Festival, driving past clusters of locals with digital cameras who hope to catch a glimpse of movie stars. When the guys pass, the looky-loos point cluelessly—the scraggly hair and half-open eyes make them seem famous.

After an hour, they reach a woodsy lake-island where the festival is under way; by the time MGMT play the main stage, the late afternoon sun is shining. A man on stilts in a red tuxedo and top hat chopsticks through the dense, largely female masses. When the band exits, the crowd screams like an encore is possible. (It is not.)

Just after sunset, Van Wyngarden and Goldwasser gather twigs to build a bonfire in the backstage compound, the pressure of performing before some 20,000 people giving way to casual mischief. Musicians venture out of their trailers and flock to the flames. Sir Richard Branson glides by as if he’s just trimmed his sails. Then Jason Pierce of Spiritualized approaches, and Van Wyngarden’s and Goldwasser’s eyes widen. Pierce says hello, tells them he loves their record, and asks about their upcoming tours. When he bids farewell, they are vibrating like tweens who’ve just coaxed a Jonas Brother to part with his purity ring. “Oh my God, he’s our idol,” says

 

ON VAN W YNGARDEN AND GOLDWASSER THOM BROWNE SIAMESE T WIN SUIT, SHIRTS, AND TIES, THOMBROWNE.COM.