“Time To Pretend” by MGMT

"Time to Pretend" was the lead single from MGMT's debut, Oracular Spectacular, arriving on March 3, 2008, though the song had already done the rounds on the band's earlier Time to Pretend EP. Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser wrote and arranged it, VanWyngarden supplied the words, and Dave Fridmann produced, engineered and mixed it with them, piling on the kind of glittering, woozy psychedelia that makes a debut sound like a planetarium show.

The 7-inch came backed with a BBC Radio 1 session take of "Weekend Wars", the CD with "Metanoia". In early 2009 the song got a second push in Britain after it turned up on the teen drama Skins, and the lists have been kind: Rolling Stone later counted it among its 500 greatest songs of all time, and NME put it at 90 on its own.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.