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Europe has been a place of battles and political intrigue for centuries.

Samuels finds out if psych-songsmiths MGMT have burned the bridge back to sanity—and pop—by entering a world of darkness and electronics with their third, self-titled LP. Above left to right: Andrew Van Wyngarden and Ben Goldwasser Working-class clout has appeared at the heart of the Anglo-American conception of authenticity ever since the late seventies, when narratives of pop music’s blue-collar roots became a kind of common knowledge and the terms “middle class” and “suburban” became epithets.

Not so MGMT’s Ben Goldwasser and Andrew Van Wyngarden.

They were just waiting for something else to happen." Van Wyngarden, the shaggy-haired lead guitarist, adds: "I think we've been so successful because we don't try and sound like the Strokes. We avoid that label because we are not afraid, like a lot of bands are, of making pop music. People were listening to older stuff."The school in question was Wesleyan University, the elite US establishment where the two met as music students and which Van Wyngarden proudly describes as "the most liberal college in America".

They bonded over a love of obscure music, hallucinogenics and a desire to "mess with people's minds".

We do social surrealism - we're more like rococo than psychedelic."Similarly they do not identify themselves with the MP3 generation that has developed an eclectic taste in music through file-sharing.The timestamp is only as accurate as the clock in the camera, and it may be completely wrong.For nearly a decade now, the legacy of Manhattan four-piece the Strokes has dominated indie rock, inspiring an army of skinny-jeaned boys from Arctic Monkeys to Razorlight.To that end, they formed a joke concept band where they would play along to an i Pod, naked or dressed as snowmen, and would "make up songs about tyres and dinosaurs.We'd leave the stage and leave the music playing to see how people reacted." They snigger conspiratorially at the memory."We have always been equally about idealism and cynicism.When we were first singing 'The youth are starting to change', we didn't really know what change we were talking about.