MGMT earned its legend early on by being a band that could absolutely score a hit when it wanted to, but deciding that, nah, it didn’t actually need to. Through this approach, with and plenty of interesting, poppy, yet challenging music, MGMT must already be counted as one of the greatest alternative bands of all time.

No, I don’t think I’m exaggerating at all! Stop writing those angry comments in my direction!

Look, I’ll prove it! These are the greatest 10 songs by MGMT, and I haven’t avoided those tunes that everybody and their cat seems to know.

Greatest 10 Songs by MGMT

10. “Nothing to Declare”

MGMT has done things its way for a long time. And with critics wooed and the general audience tipped off to expect the unexpected, 2024’s “Loss of Life” found the band blending its eccentricities with traditional music formats.

I think that it’s unfair that this album wasn’t more widely praised. Hearing the Beatlesque acoustic-pop of “Nothing to Declare” is a real shock considering the band’s previous, wild experimentalism. And, yes, it’s a sweet, satisfying listen as well. One of the MGMT’s greatest tracks!

9. “Siberian Breaks”

There was a collective sigh of disapproval when Arctic Monkeys refused to follow up “AM” with a similarly themed album, or when the world learned that The Neighbourhood couldn’t quite produce more songs of the quality of “Sweater Weather.”

And that was the case with MGMT’s sophomore release, “Congratulations.” The best part, I think, is that the American duo was laughing all the way through reading the negative reviews.

This was an album designed to be challenging. The 12-minute “Siberian Breaks” is almost an indie-powered prog-rocker, and a song that keeps testing the patience and willingness of the audience to travel with the band on these wild journeys.

8. “Weekend Wars”

Years before power AI came along, you needed to blame the CIA or some other shadowy organisation for something seemingly as carefully orchestrated as the success of MGMT.

I remember the world crying out for an indie saviour back in the 2000s. MGMT provided three danceable hits with their debut album.

But it was the group’s idiosyncrasies and natural taste for psychedelia that can be heard on “Weekend Wars.” As it turns out, this would become the group’s calling card.

7. “Who’s Counting”

Ideally, VanWyngarden and Goldwasser just want to be known to the public as challenging psych-pop artists. In their perfect world, they could solely make music that sounds like The Velvet Underground trying to entertain an audience of Deadheads.

So, I suppose, that the duo got closest to reaching its goal with the live album “11.11.11.” An original set of songs performed for the Guggenheim Museum, the record was the perfect excuse to ditch any expectations of earning a new pop hit.

The band sounds thrilled, and “Who’s Counting” is a real gem. It’s almost a shame it didn’t get polished and re-released as a studio track later on.

6. “Brian Eno”

Clearly, MGMT had learned a thing or two from the great masters. But, although most people, myself included, assumed that the band’s influences were mostly pop songwriters, the duo proved that they possessed greater ambitions and far better record collections than initially expected.

“Brian Eno” is the closest that the “Congratulations” album gets to having a pop track. And that’s ironic, because the song is an all-out tribute to the greatest trickster in music production.

5. “Little Dark Age”

At this stage, MGMT must have a really good reason for putting the band’s name on a pop song. “Little Dark Age” provided that reason by representing the collective pessimism felt around 2018, including Soviet synth-pop and getting the band to work to collaborate with Ariel Pink on a few of the tracks. All of this, I’d like to think, made the era a little more tolerable.

It was one of the band’s strongest releases. The single and the album endeared the group, once again, to the general public.

4. “Kids”

Music critics always warn their audience that, likely, there are simply no more original pop-rock bangers to be enjoyed ever again from this moment forward. But they’ve been doing this since the 1950s, and I’m sure that they’re wrong.

“Kids” was absolutely infectious-sounding. A song about the innocence of childhood, benefiting from one of the biggest hooks of the decade, “Kids” is inescapable from indie-rock playlists of the time.

3. “Electric Feel”

Swedish producers and Italian dance beat makers must’ve slapped their foreheads in unison. How did they not think of this?

Depending on who you believe, “Electric Feel” was either a psych-pop masterplan by Ben Goldwasser and Andrew Van Wyngarden, or a prank to get record labels to invest in their demos.

Whatever it was, “Electric Feel” is, I believe, a great pop song and one of the strangest to earn this kind of success. It’s no wonder it created so many inferior copycats.

2. “Congratulations”

MGMT retreated from the pop mainstream on just their second album. They announced this split with the beautiful synth and acoustic guitar lead “Congratulations.”

The record company execs must’ve been ringing up the hitmen when they heard it. But “Congratulations” has proved just as influential as any of the band’s early hits, I believe.

1. “Time to Pretend”

For most of the band’s debut album, 2007’s “Oracular Spectacular,” it was hard to tell whether MGMT were, like the similarly themed psych-pop duo Empire of the Sun, trying to start a kind of cult or just joking around.

I was relieved to find out that it was the latter. “Time to Pretend” was an undeniably catchy electro-pop song about planning out your career down to details about marrying models and dying from drug overdoses.

Somehow, “Time to Pretend,” as well as the rest of the album, caught on with the general public. To its credit, MGMT has fought long and hard to live outside the shadow of “Oracular Spectacular.” This is, however, the alternative group’s finest hour and a cherry on top of their unusual career path.