MGMT has made their living on synth lines with songs like “Kids,”  “Time To Pretend,” and  “Electric Feel.”  All of them have five or six simple notes that resonate in your head long after listening.  But with the band’s upcoming album “Congratulations,” MGMT has turned their music upside down with their first single, “Flash Delirium.”

Opening with soft, unenhanced vocals, “Flash Delirium” provides a totally different feel from MGMT.  The dance-pop synths are gone, replaced by guitars.

The song is structure-less: there is no set verse-chorus-verse format.  Instead, the parts of the song flow continuously, one after another, each with a different flavor.  The beginning of the song has as a pop-punk feel behind a surf beat on the drums. Later in the song, a recorder solo gives it a feel of the Far East.

MGMT fans who like the band just for songs like “Kids” or “Time To Pretend” will not like this.  It’s that simple.  The song bears little resemblance to those tracks.  In fact, the band sums it up perfectly with some of the lines from the song: “Here’s a growing culture / Deep inside a corpse / Ages stuck together/ Takin’ it to the source/ Timeless desperation / Pictures on a screen scream / ‘Hey people, what does it mean?’”

What does “Flash Delirium” mean?  What does this mean for the rest of “Congratulations?”  What does this song and album mean for the future of the band?

We’ll just have to wait and see.

Daniel Gallen can be reached for comment at [email protected]