Veering from psychedelic prog to bizarro glam to drug-dipped folk, MGMT's sophomore album Congratulations is undoubtedly one of the more unpredictable big-ticket albums in recent memory. The album seems to flout their simple, synth-y hits like "Kids" and "Time to Pretend", instead paying tribute to offbeat heroes like Brian Eno and leader of UK schitzo-punk institution Television Personalities, Dan Treacy. It's a ballsy move. And-- considering things like their Dada freakout of a video for "Flash Delirium"-- oftentimes an inexplicable one.

We recently called Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser in a hotel in Sydney, Australia, where they were playing a couple gigs as part of a world tour that will have them crossing the planet through the end of the year. Talking about their musical heroes-- risk takers including Roxy Music and Neil Young-- the pair sounded genuinely in awe. Their love of outsider legends led them to recruit ex-Spaceman 3 member Pete "Sonic Boom" Kember to co-produce Congratulations, which also features vocals from Royal Trux's Jennifer Herrema-- not exactly your typical blog-bait indie guest stars.

MGMT are at a vulnerable and important junction in their creative lives, and their short bursts of laughter during our interview seemed to indicate a nervous excitement. After infiltrating the mainstream with their surprise hit debut LP, Oracular Spectacular, these guys are seeing how far they can go with flute solos, 12-minute songs, and disgusting, wormy visuals peppered in along the way. If you're still a bit confused by Congratulations' twists and burps, please allow VanWyngarden and Goldwasser to explain themselves a bit:

Pitchfork: Congratulations has a real curatorial nature to it with songs that name-check people like Brian Eno and Dan Treacy, along with the fact that you recruited Sonic Boom to help produce it. Were you guys going out of your way to turn the kids who really loved "Kids" onto these more obscure styles and artists?

AV: We like the idea of being a little divisive without making it into some kind of philosophical musical approach, and maybe we can convert some people to our view of the world [laughs]. We weren't trying to be pretentious about it, like, "This is the music you should listen to." But we definitely wouldn't mind if people were like, "Who is Dan Treacy?" and then listened to some Television Personalities songs. And this album is just very much about musicians-- from Dan Treacy to Lady Gaga-- and the oddness of a music career. It's also coming from us having the opportunity to meet the people who made the music Ben and I bonded over at Wesleyan, stuff like Spacemen 3, Royal Trux, and Brian Eno. We didn't realize we were doing it at the time, but it's funny looking at the album now-- it's like a Jay-Z, all-star-cast album, but they're our all-stars.

Pitchfork: Why did you end up choosing Sonic Boom to co-produce the record?

AV: Ben and I were originally set on producing this album ourselves. On the first album, we loved everything Dave Fridmann did and were really proud of it, but I felt like we never really got credit as producers. So we were like, "Yeah, we're going to show them this time." But once we realized we had the opportunity to work with Sonic Boom we figured why not go for it. We still wanted to be the directors of everything, though, and it turned out so well.

We rented a house in Malibu, brought a bunch of equipment into the living room, and had this really relaxed recording environment. Pete would DJ our dinners and play early Van Morrison, Joe Meek, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Specials, Lee Hazlewood-- just a ton of amazing music that was up our alley. We did a lot of jamming with Pete, playing Spacemen 3 and Spectrum songs. Sometimes Ben and I would just look at each other like, "Is this really happening?"

Pitchfork: It seems like the recording process had the potential to get a bit... zany.

BG: We use that word to describe it a lot. [laughs]

AV: We felt zany and kooky. In Malibu, it was like a camp for weirdos and Pete was the counselor.

BG: Yeah, one night, our guitar player James [Richardson] told me that if you go outside at the right time you'll see "the snailing hour." [laughs] I thought he was totally full of shit. But we went outside just as the morning dew was settling and the ground was literally carpeted in snails. You couldn't walk without stepping on snails.

AV: Pete was setting up candles a lot of the time and we'd have little ceremonies in the backyard. We burnt a rabbit in the fountain [laughs]-- not a real rabbit, a doll. We didn't sacrifice any real animals.

Pitchfork: That anything-goes vibe really comes through on the album.

AV: We wanted it to be loose. On the first album, Ben and I just kept adding stuff to the point that it was ridiculous. But this time we tried to restrain ourselves and Pete was there to be like, "No, we don't need to add 20 saxophone parts to this section."

Pitchfork: When you listen to "Flash Delirium" and watch the video, it's easy to think, "These guys are on drugs and just doing whatever the fuck they want to do." But reading the lyrics to that song, it struck me as quasi-political.

AV: It's not like we wanted to get really political in terms of specific causes, but I think a lot of the lyrics deal with paranoia and feeling like "the man" is in control somehow. There was this large group of people that we were talking about on the first album-- "The Youth"-- but we didn't really know what to tell them. We still don't know what to tell them, but we want to make it seem like maybe there's something we know that they want to know, too.

BG: [laughs] You don't know what we know.

AV: And we don't know, either-- but don't tell them that. [laughs]

Pitchfork: "Flash Delirium" reads true to me because its musical twists act as mirror to this ridiculous, sped-up society that we happen to be a part of right now.

BG: We're really into combining lots of different styles into one song, that's normal for us. It might seem arbitrary, but we listen to a lot music that does that. We didn't realize how weird people would think it was. We just wanted to write a song with three different choruses instead of repeating the same chorus over and over again.

AV: We took a lot of experimental music courses at Wesleyan and both realized how influential those were in how we approach pop music. We think about strategies in pop songs to make people listen to them and be like, "What the hell was that?" But then they have to listen to it again.

Pitchfork: Whether you thought about it or not, pushing forward those more experimental tendencies and not just remaking something like "Time to Pretend" is pretty brave.

AV: A lot of people are calling it stupid [laughs]. But "brave" is cool with me.

BG: There was never a point where we decided we were going to make the poppiest songs ever.

AV: Well, yeah we did, sort of. But it was really ironically.

BG: Well, we definitely weren't trying to get a record deal. I remember when we wrote "Kids", I started writing the music in such a weird mood, drunk at 3 a.m. by myself. I wasn't trying to write music that people would like. I don't know if I want to be in that mood, I was almost really depressed. And we were in such good moods while we were writing the new album. It's weird that some of our poppiest songs came from us beating our heads against the wall.

Pitchfork: In a 2008 cover story in Spin, Andrew talked about the beginning of MGMT and said, "We were less about quality, more about absurdity. We were trying to be obnoxious, but somehow people got into it." Would you still say that's an accurate view of how the band started?

AV: That wasn't all there was to it. For me, coming from a high school in Memphis, I was never really exposed to much music besides what my sister was listening to, which was classic rock and Grateful Dead and maybe Pavement-- that was the furthest I got into indie. And then I got to Wesleyan and there was so much music. Ben and I just felt like we were blowing up with all these different ideas. We bonded by hanging out and trying to shock people. We thought of ourselves as musical terrorists at shows-- were weren't biting heads off bats, but we wanted to annoy and confront people. Later on, we  realized a lot of bands-- especially Suicide and Royal Trux-- didn't care about how their audiences were going to react and probably enjoyed it when they reacted negatively [laughs].

And then, all of a sudden, we're signed to a label and playing Coachella. When we played at Wesleyan we would just run around or even leave the stage for the middle section of "Kids" and we tried to do that at Coachella. But we quickly came to the realization that you can't do that on a large scale as easily. People aren't going to run behind you and do cartwheels, they're going to just stare and be like, "What the hell are you doing?" [laughs]

Pitchfork: Listening to this album, I can still hear the obnoxiousness-- not in a totally pejorative sense, but just like how you're not giving a shit if someone who liked "Kids" likes this, too.

BG: In some ways we don't really care about mainstream acceptance, but in some ways we're still trying to make pop music. Maybe we're just stupid and don't realize you can't make music that sounds like a chase scene from a "Scooby Doo" cartoon and have people take you seriously. [laughs] When we did "A Song for Dan Treacy" we sort of thought it sounded like that, but we didn't think it was a bad thing.

AV: I think there are actually two songs that sound like that. [laughs]

Pitchfork: The title track is a really self-reflexive, troubled song about the trappings of being a famous musician. Do you worry about those things a lot?

AV: We were thinking about how other people deal with this career on every song. We got to meet people like Thom Yorke and hear him say how it's never normal when fans just come up to you. It's always a strange job. We don't want to come off like we're pitying ourselves for having this job because it's really amazing in a lot of ways. But there's a lot of stuff that comes with it that we're not really comfortable with.

In general, the musicians we met that made the most sense just said to do what feels right and try not worry about what other people think. I know that sounds stupid and simple. I feel like Neil Young has done that and he's still making albums. He's one of the people I really look up to as someone who has kind of stuck to their guns their whole career. Just making music for music.

Pitchfork: And Neil Young was sued by his label in the 80s for making an album that didn't sound like Neil Young. What were your feelings when you first played Congratulations for your label, Columbia?

AV: We gave it to them around Christmas Eve and they had two weeks to listen to it over their holiday, and then we had this big meeting. I was really nervous. We thought they were going to be like, "Go record some more songs." But they really liked the album. Their favorite tracks were [the 12-minute track] "Siberian Breaks" [laughs] and "Brian Eno". They just asked us, "This is the album you want to put out, right?" And we we're like, "Yes." And they're like, "Okay!" [laughs] Then they had to figure out how to market it. [laughs]

Pitchfork: Are you sure they weren't trying some reverse psychology on you guys? [laughs]

AV: The two heads at Columbia really seem to be letting us do our own thing. I'm sure there's motivations behind that, too, like adding some sort of level of coolness to Columbia Records. Not that we're cool. I mean, I'm sure they wouldn't have minded if there was one dance floor banger on there.

BG: We don't want to have this attitude like we're doing something that's so weird. To us, it makes complete sense and is totally rational. We've thought about every moment on the album, and we're not just trying to be absurd for the sake of it. It's hard to have that attitude when people are asking us if we're deliberately trying to lose fans. Of course we're not trying to do that, we're just at a point where if we aren't as true to ourselves as we possibly can then we're going to go crazy.

Pitchfork: At the same time, something like the "Flash Delirium" video looks pretty insane in and of itself.

AV: On the first album, Ben and I wanted to be in control of everything in the videos but this time we really let go and found some really cool directors. Their ideas are even crazier than ours. ["Flash Delirium" director] Andreas Nilsson is so much more bizarre than we could ever be. [laughs] He doesn't think the video is weird at all. We just shot the coolest video in Paris with director So Me [Justice's "D.A.N.C.E."] for "It's Working". In it, Ben and I find this box and these instructions to put together a machine that's constantly changing, and we end up losing control over it. Saying this now, it sounds so metaphorical for our musical career, which is really funny.