You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Herway.

This episode has some explicit language.

You're listening to Song Exploder. My name is Rishikesh Herway.

MGMT was formed by Ben Goldwasser and Andrew Van Wijngarten in 2001.

The song Time to Pretend was when they wrote early in their career.

It first came out on their debut, the Time to Pretend EP in 2005.

And three years after that, they put out a new version of the song on their first full-length album,

A Racular Spectacular, which was named album of the year by NME, and was one of Rolling Stones top 20 albums of the decade.

It went on to sell over a million copies worldwide.

In this episode, Ben and Andrew trace how the song Time to Pretend was made, from its dorm room origins to its first recording,

to re-envisioning it with Grammy-winning producer Dave Friedman.

They also uncover the hidden sounds and Easter eggs within the recording.

Here's MGMT on Song Exploder.

This is Ben from MGMT.

Most of the sounds in both the recording on the EP and on the album version have been around since we were in college.

I mean, the actual sounds that we made on my laptop without any fancy studio gear or anything like that.

Most of that stuff is still on the recordings.

That was totally broke. I couldn't afford any musical gear at all.

I mean, it was all on the laptop that I used to write papers on for college.

There's just sense in reason.

Like, everything pretty much is one of the stock synthesizers that comes with the program.

And in college and our spare time, we just spent a lot of time messing around with those synths and trying to see what kinds of crazy noises we could get out of them.

...