Known for being one of the leading groups in the electro-pop/psychedelic-rock music category, MGMT brings a long-awaited great album to fans in their 2018 album, “Little Dark Age.”

After releasing their first album, “Oracular Spectacular,” in 2006, the musical duo quickly found rising popularity with songs like “Time to Pretend,” “Electric Feel” and “Kids.” These songs propelled MGMT’s first album to worldwide success, giving the group a certified gold rating in five countries, platinum in three countries and double platinum in Ireland. This streak of success did not last forever though. With the release of their next two albums, “Congratulations,” and their self-titled “MGMT” album, they did not achieve a gold rating in a single country.

It has been a long, five-year wait for fans, but in February of this year, MGMT finally released another album, “Little Dark Age.” Since its release, the album has received mostly positive feedback from the fans, scoring a 77 out of 100 on Metacritic and three or four-star reviews on other websites. Below, I will review of some of my favorite and least favorite songs from this album.

1. Little Dark Age

Starting off with the single, “Little Dark Age,” this song takes on the classic MGMT style with a heavy electronic-pop and techno sound along with a slow-moving melody. This song is probably one of my favorites off of this album, and I would even argue it could possibly compete with prior MGMT hits like “Kids” or “Electric Feel.” The verses in this track are very slow and have a  heavy echo effect on them, making them a little hard to understand at times, but the chorus quickly picks up the pace and is quite catchy. This is definitely one of the driving hits off of this album and has received enormous praise from MGMT fans.

2.) She Works Out Too Much

Now for one of the weaker (and definitely weirder) tracks on this album, “She Works Out Too Much.” As the opening song of “Little Dark Age,” this song sets a fast pace and confusing tone for the listener. Luckily, this is an outlier from the rest of the songs on this album, as the other nine tracks are much slower and have more of a traditional MGMT tone to them. Although I can tell what the band was trying to achieve with the background workout instructor interrupting periodically throughout the song, I found it to be a major hindrance to the song and overall just annoying. In my opinion, this was definitely the worst on this album, but there were only a few bad songs on “Little Dark Age” to bring down the rating of it.

3.) TSLAMP  

This one is another that felt very bizarre and even at some points simply annoying. This song sounds like a blend of mariachi and modern electro-pop music, which, in my opinion, do not mix very well. “TSLAMP” progresses at a medium tempo, but remains constant throughout the song without many interesting lyrics or instrumentals besides the very quick guitar solo. Overall I would describe this song in its entirety as simply bland. The song isn’t necessarily bad, but it isn’t interesting either.

4.) When You Die

My personal favorite track off of this album, “When You Die,” is a morbid, catchy and fun tune that hints at similarities to past songs by MGMT, while also creating a new sound which the band could pursue in the future. Although this is probably one of the faster songs in the album besides “She Works Out Too Much,” it still matches nicely with MGMT’s overall tone of mellowness with the strange but well thought-out combination of instruments and synth tracks used throughout this song.

“Little Dark Age” was MGMT’s fourth full-length studio album and is overall a very interesting album with a unique sound to it. Because of great hits like “Little Dark Age,” “When You Die,” and a few others that I did not mention in this article like “Me and Michael,” and “When You’re Small,” I’m giving this album a rating of eight out of ten. The only things that drag the rating down are the songs “TSLAMP” and “She Works Out Too Much,” but even then, “Little Dark Age” is a great MGMT album and I encourage any fans of the band or the genre to listen to it.