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Goldwasser. “We were obsessed with his music for a long time. It’s kinda crazy we’re friends now. Really good friends. Like, best friends.”

The duo’s obsessions inform the mystical end-times themes and otherworldliness in Oracular Spectacular’s lyrics and videos. Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Carlos Castaneda, Daniel Pinchbeck, and Alan W. Watts’ The Wisdom of Insecurity all get name-checked on the album— originally titled Mystic Bullshit, Van Wyngarden says—as do movies such as 1971’s landmark surf flick Morning of the Earth and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surreal 1973 The Holy Mountain.

“It’s not a concept album, but we were imagining a scenario after this apocalyptic event,” says Goldwasser, “like a tribe of young people who survived, living on a beach and rebuilding their society.” This fantasy is played out in their “Time to Pretend” and “Electric Feel” videos, both directed by Wesleyan friend Ray Tintori and starring their pals dressed in artfully torn clothes. In the former, they surf solar winds and ride giant cats through space; in the latter, the refugees slice open the moon and spread its neon ooze over their bodies.

So, hallucinogenic drug use seems like a fair line of questioning. “We’re open about it,” says Goldwasser. “Maybe that’s why we have this reputation for being fucked-up all the time. We’ve never written music while under the influence of [drugs].” For him, the horse came before the cart. “I was aware of psychedelic music a long time before I ever tried drugs.” His first trip, on LSD at a Phish concert when he was 16, yielded a crucial revelation. “It made me think jam music was completely stupid and that egocentric 15- minute solos were boring.”

Back at the hotel after the bonfire, it’s too late to buy alcohol, which is a problem, since guests will start arriving any minute. Berman corrals a girl he met yesterday, despite Van Wyngarden’s initial reservations: “What kind of girl gives a stranger her number in a hotel elevator?” Goldwasser and his girlfriend retired to their room long ago.

Four hours later, the alcohol conundrum long since solved, many pairs of shoes are scattered around the two double beds in Van Wyngarden’s room. On one, a roadie is writhing in a four-girl sandwich; Berman sits at the foot of the bed with the elevator girl on his lap yapping away. Two sets of young doe eyes lock in on Van Wyngarden. Every light is on, the iPod dock blares on shuffle, opened mini bottles of Rémy Martin litter the desk. Yet thanks to the palpable, gleeful, parents-are-out-of-town enthusiasm of everyone involved, the scene never feels anything but oddly wholesome.

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hree days later, over milk shakes and burgers on Manhattan’s West Side— before another gig at another fashion party, and between rehearsals for their first show supporting Beck at the Hollywood Bowl—Van Wyngarden and Goldwasser reflect on such rock-star matters as the whirlwind their lives have become and, um, how much they miss their moms. “We are really caught up in something right now, and it’s a little scary,” says Van Wyngarden. Rush-hour buses screech down Ninth Avenue as if on cue.

Two years ago, they were living in different towns, thinking MGM T had run its course. When they stop touring in January, they will have spent a year and a half traversing the globe, and though they’ve been tagged as a Brooklyn band, they don’t consider the borough home—Goldwasser lives in Newark, New Jersey; Van Wyngarden has been crashing at temporary digs when not getting booted from homeless shelters. “I was reading Good Housekeeping in a doctor’s office, and Jennifer Aniston was on the cover,” he says. “It was all

about how she’s happier than she’s ever been because she has a home base. I’m sitting in this dark room, thinking, ‘Jennifer’s right!’ I need a place to call home—for my sanity.”

“In the last two months, there’s been a big change,” adds Goldwasser. “Maybe because we’re being played on shows like Gossip Girl—that shit opens up a whole new world.” In Ireland, fans begged for the shirts off their backs; in Paris, Gucci showed a spring 2009 line inspired by what’s been described as MGMT’s “rich hippie/Gypsy-chic” style. (“The word retarded comes to mind,” Van Wyngarden says.) Closer to home, public interest in their personal lives has crept into their consciousness. One anonymous blog chronicles their every move with eerily obsessive posts, including outing Will Berman as Dunst’s true special friend. “That’s a level of weirdness that just started,” Goldwasser sighs.

These chaotic months, in which their campus lark has exploded into a global concern, raises questions: How do they develop a career they didn’t even know they wanted, and on their own terms? Will they swallow the handshake? One plan that’s already under way is to make Richardson, Asti, and Berman full-blown

MGMT members, all the better to diffuse the spotlight’s glare. “Now that we’ve infiltrated the mainstream, we have ample opportunity to mess with people,”

Van Wyngarden shouts over the increasing dinner-rush din. “So far, we’ve done it in a classy way—we made music we like that’s weird, but it also got picked up on the radio. The gate is open. There’s no way to keep our experiences normal. Lyrically, we want to keep reading books and watching movies, so it’s not about drinking and girls and being on tour.”

Goldwasser shifts in his seat. A ballroom full of models and the fashionistas who employ them waits down the block.

“There are so many clichés we can fall into.” Van Wyngarden continues. “An ultimate goal is not to become a douche bag.”

GE T MORE GO BEHIND THE SCENES OF OUR TRIPPED-OUT COVER SHOO T AT SPIN.COM/ MGMT-VIDEO