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Time to Pretend, the first single from MGMT’s acclaimed debut album, Oracular Spectacular, offers a fantasy version of the American duo’s rise to rock stardom. In it, they make piles of money, buy fast cars, marry supermodels and acquire heroin habits before, at the end of the song, choking on their vomit and dying. “We’re fated to pretend,” they sing as the bubbling synths and sugar-sweet melody reach their climax.

Only they’re not pretending. They might have been back in 2004 when, as music students at Wesleyan University, Connecticut, they originally recorded the track. Then they were just two hippie throwbacks, the cool but weird kids on campus, trying, as they put it, to “come up with a work of art”. They didn’t suspect for a moment that the noise they were making on their primitive keyboards and secondhand guitars would ever gain an audience.

“We were sequestered in this little warehouse space, like lab rats,” says the singer-guitarist, Andrew VanWyngarden, talking above the early-evening din of a central London bar and looking every inch the Haight-Ashbury loon, with lank hair, pink bandanna and tie-dye T-shirt. “We’d be sitting on the floor, eating bagels and going crazy. Sometimes it got really intense. Like, we’d argue over what type of reverb to put on a snare or where to put the handclaps on a song.”

“Then we’d listen to these things we’d been obsessing over, and they’d sound horrible,” continues the bassist/ keyboardist, Ben Goldwasser, the one with the tight black curls that, he reckons, make him resemble Bob Dylan on the cover of Infidels. “We’d think, ‘Why are we even making this music? It’s awful.’ ” It wasn’t so awful, however, that it didn’t attract the attention of SonyBMG, who signed MGMT to a six-figure, four-album deal in 2006. The following year, they began recording with the producer Dave Fridmann at his Tarbox Road Studios, in Cassadaga, upstate New York. The former Mercury Rev member, who, since 1990, has been producing virtually all releases by Mercury Rev and the Flaming Lips, gave Oracular Spectacular his trademark expansive, open sound. Although it has been compared to everyone from Scissor Sisters to Suicide, the duo’s bright, commercial take on the “cosmic American music” of Deserter’s Songs and The Soft Bulletin has a latterday psychedelic feel. It has been embraced by the pop mainstream, the left-field press and fashion connoisseurs. Suddenly, Time to Pretend looks more like a document than a dream.

As VanWyngarden notes: “On Sunday, we’re going to DJ a party for supermodels at some fancy club in Paris. Do we have supermodel appeal? I hope so.”

Adds Goldwasser: “During fashion week, they were playing our music on five different catwalks.”

They acknowledge the irony of Time to Pretend’s lyric and the way it seems to be coming true. “It was a complete joke,” Goldwasser says, “and now it’s not a joke at all. I just hope it doesn’t become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like, we don’t want to do heroin.”

VanWyngarden isn’t so sure. “If I haven’t tried it by the time I’m 80, I’m going to start doing it then,” he says. “I’m probably going to have really bad joints by then, and heroin’s a great painkiller.”

If anything, Oracular Spectacular has the trippy, spacey atmosphere of psychedelia: at a rammed show at the ICA, in London, at the beginning of March, augmented by a guitarist, a bassist and a drummer, MGMT were half electronic pop act, half progressive-rock band, like the Grateful Dead jamming through the Daft Punk songbook. The musicians soloed wildly, lost in music, creating a looser version of the album’s tightly constructed, altered-state pop, with its swirling synthesizer motifs and echo-drenched vocals.

VanWyngarden, who lives in Brooklyn, and Goldwasser, who lives in New Jersey, both look like psychedelic casualties, albeit baby-faced ones. Their parents lean towards the bohemian: VanWyngarden’s father, for example, edits “an alternative newspaper” in Memphis, while it is not unusual for his mother, a photographer in New Mexico, to sit down with him and his sister to share a joint. “My sister and my mom can get pretty crazy,” he says. “It makes me feel quite square.” He admits to being in thrall to the hippie era: “It makes you feel kind of lame, like I’m just a clone of my parents, a little hippie who wants to be in the 1960s. But we also want to destroy stuff and cause chaos.”

How far does he take his fascination with psychedelia? Were hallucinogens involved in the making of Oracular Spectacular? The songs exude childlike wonder and a sense of minds being expanded.

“We don’t want to come off like we’re a drug band,” says Goldwasser, the more cautious of the pair, “but I’d say we’ve had some formative experiences.”

“Yeah, we had some great experiences in college and postcollege,” agrees his partner, a fan of Carlos Castaneda’s mescaline adventures. “Not that the album was written on drugs,” Goldwasser advises.

Drugs, supermodels, acclaim . . . Will MGMT become rock monsters? “No, I don’t think so,” Goldwasser replies. “You’ve got to have the right personality type, and I don’t. I have too much self-censorship. I couldn’t ever just do whatever I wanted and not feel guilty about it.”

After the ICA gig, which was packed to the rafters with industry cognoscenti, VanWyngarden bounded towards a blacked-out Lexus, skinny brunette in tow. “He’s like 1970s Bowie,” said a well-connected press officer, revealing that MGMT’s front man is currently living the Time to Pretend lyric to the letter.

Nevertheless, MGMT insist they don’t have ambitions to become mega-celebrities. “I don’t think we’d ever aspire to be the biggest band in the world,” Goldwasser decides at the end of the interview. “It was funny for us to talk about how huge we were going to get, then, all of a sudden, for people to start saying we’re commercial. But we’ve backed away from that.”

“I’ve heard people say they haven’t heard this much buzz since the Strokes,” VanWyngarden says. “But we don’t listen to that shit, man. I feel we’re amateurish in all respects.”

For Goldwasser, MGMT’s fast-growing myth dissolves on contact with the players. “For anyone who’s spent more than five minutes with us, any mystique, or sense that we’re untouchable, is totally destroyed. Nobody could ever believe we were capable of being huge rock stars after meeting us.”

Or, as VanWyngarden puts it: “We don’t want to be douche bags.”

Oracular Spectacular is out now on Columbia; MGMT’s UK tour starts on May 5 at Cardiff Great Hall

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