Now that I am writing for Midwest Coast, it appears I have some catching up to do with some of the albums released in 2024. This week, lets explore Loss of Life—MGMT’s latest excursion into sonic oddities and tangled nostalgia. This album, their fifth, sees the duo departing from their previous goth-tinged fare (a la Little Dark Age) and sauntering back toward their indie roots, though with a twisted, self-aware maturity that only MGMT could muster.
The album opens with “Loss of Life (Part 2),” a track that, rather perversely, leaps straight into the metaphysical with a reading of “I Am Taliesin, I Sing Perfect Metre”—a medieval poem that frames life as an interconnected swirl of cycles. Oh, how delightfully MGMT to start with Part 2 and leave us hanging, like a surrealist telling of the ouroboros. This peculiar opener gives way to “Mother Nature,” a paean to simpler indie days with tinges of Oasis and echoes of ‘90s dream rock.
Throughout Loss of Life, MGMT displays a magpie-like approach to genre. Tracks like “Dancing in Babylon,” with its operatic excess that would make Jim Steinman blush, and “Bubblebum Dog,” a Bowie-esque number that draws from both glam rock and baroque whimsy, and happens to be my personal favorite of the album. “Nothing Changes” explores life’s unrelenting cycles with a Sisyphean wink, while the title track—spread across two parts—fuses concepts of death, rebirth, and the monotony of existence into something almost, dare I say, sincere.
With the production hand of Patrick Wimberly and some input from the sonic architect Dave Fridmann, MGMT crafts a soundscape that feels retro and experimental without straying into pastiche (well, not entirely, anyway). It’s as if they’ve cobbled together pieces of their musical past only to present it through a kaleidoscope of jaded wisdom and hallucinatory aesthetics.
In sum, Loss of Life is an album that revels in its own absurdity while occasionally tipping its hat to earnestness. It’s a mature offering from a band that somehow balances the profound and the preposterous in a way that only they can. I’ll give it a curiously morose yet ironically affectionate overall rating. Score: 7.6/10 -NPS