MGMT – Little Dark Age
2017 · Directed by David MacNutt & Nathaniel Axel
2.6M Likes
Best comments
1.“It's like watching a bunch of art students celebrate Halloween on mass amounts of LSD.”
More comments
- 2.“He looked so offended when she bit into that apple.”
- 3.“So cool to see Edward Scissorhands finally drop his debut single. Always knew he could pull it off.”
The story
MGMT showed up for their fourth album dressed for a funeral. Little Dark Age was the title track and first single, and the video, directed by David MacNutt and Nathaniel Axel, went full gothic. MacNutt was family by then: he'd acted in the band's old videos for Time to Pretend and Electric Feel.
It plays like a string of scenes from a haunted mansion. Fencers spar in a misty garden. A magician works his card tricks. Ben Goldwasser scribbles away with a quill pen. Fruit gets chopped, a couple kisses under a dusty sheet, and a masked Death figure blows out plumes of vape smoke. Andrew VanWyngarden wears his eyeliner like Robert Smith left it to him in a will. New Zealand musician Connan Mockasin, former Playmate Hiromi Oshima and magician Kid Ace fill out the cast. Spin called it Dada-esque.
The song did fine in 2017. Then TikTok found it in late 2020, hundreds of thousands of people used it, and it has since gone double platinum in the US. A gloomy synth-pop single became the soundtrack to a million edits of anime, superheroes and Renaissance paintings. The dark age turned out to be pretty popular.
