
Tracklisting:
01. It??s Working
02. Song for Dan Treacy
03. Someone??s Missing
04. Flash Delirium
05. I Found a Whistle
06. Siberian Breaks
07. Brian Eno
08. Lady Dada??s Nightmare
09. Congratulations
"It's definitely going to shock people," Vanwyngarden recently told SPIN.com of the new album's sound. "We dropped any sort of irony that was on the first record, and Congratulations feels true to who we really are."
Congratulations' nine songs are "sequenced to flow with sonic and thematic coherence." And according to Vanwyngarden, the album moves from "Lady Dada's Nightmare," a "very nightmare-ish sounding" instrumental track inspired by the "Poker Face" pop star, to "Congratulations," a song written about fame and the "worldwide economic crisis." Through it all, he said, there's one unifying influence: surfing, a sport he picked up while recording in Malibu.
"There's a surfing thread throughout the record," he explained, citing another new song, called "It's Working." "When you're surfing, there's a specific break you're paddling to. And when the waves are really good you say, 'It's working.' The song kind of has a surf-y vibe. It's like surfing on ecstasy!"
The ocean's influence on Congratulations is also evident on MGMT's website, which features an image of a beach with crashing waves and, in the upper left corner, a timer counting down to the album's release date.
Another album track "Siberian Breaks" is a 12-minute-long tune that's "like eight different songs strung together into one, and the general theme is about surfing in the Arctic Circle by Russia," Vanwyngarden explained.