MGMT

While songs like "Kids" and "Time to Pretend" have become cultural touchstones for millennials, MGMT has always seemed insistent on defying expectations (for better or for worse) on its ensuing albums. After writing much of their debut while they were college students, Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser opted to explore psych-rock and trippy studio trickery, writing music that seemed to almost intentionally eschew the kind of hook-ridden, commercial appeal that the duo's early work happened to channel. A five-year hiatus hasn't softened MGMT's stubborn tendencies—Little Dark Age isn't going to recapture the attention of hardcore Oracular Spectacular fans, though the album's title track is probably the closest the band has come to recapturing the effervescent appeal of its early synth-pop anthems.