If you think you haven’t heard MGMT’s breakout track “Time to Pretend,” you actually probably have. Either it’s been in the background at a bar or trendy brunch place, you streamed it on MySpace or Hype Machine while high, or you’ve heard it bleeding through your hipster roommate’s wall. It’s got that ubiquitous quality that all too-catchy indie-pop seems to achieve today. It sounds like it could score a hip car commercial, but the lyrics wouldn’t pass the censors (“I’ll move to Paris, shoot some heroin, and fuck with the stars”).

“There was a time in 2006 when we stopped talking and weren’t making music,” says MGMT guitarist Andrew VanWyngarden over the phone. At that point, the duo (which also included vocalist Ben Goldwasser) had just graduated from Wesleyan University in Connecticut, recorded an EP, and gone on tour opening for Athens, Georgia spaz-poppers Of Montreal. By the end of the year the two were living in different cities in New York state, and Goldwasser was on the verge of moving to California. That’s when they got an email out of the blue. It was an offer for a major label record deal with Columbia. “We thought about it for a good two months… it was pretty crazy,” admits VanWyngarden “Signing with them would mean we’d have to start acting like a band.”

After finally deciding to ink the deal, their first order of business was to record their first LP, the recently released Ocular Spectacular, with Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridmann. Next, the duo expanded to become a quintet as Goldwasser and VanWyngarden recruited old friends from high school and summer camp to fill out their live show.

Now MGMT (pronounced as just the single letters, VanWyngarden tells me) is in the throes of a major tour of the U.S. and Canada. Yesterday night saw them play to a sold-out crowd at the El Mocambo. But between the spectacle of shows lies hundreds of miles of frozen roads. How are MGMT coping with life on the highway?

“We all have cabin fever, and it’s easy to have little panic attacks,” admits VanWyngarden. “What I would like to be doing on the road is reading a lot and drawing, but what I end up doing is putting music on and looking out the window for like four hours.”

MGMT plans to spend the rest of the year touring Ocular Spectacular hitting up Europe in the spring. Watch for them to sweep back through Canada sometime in the summer

Listen to MGMT at: www.myspace.com/mgmt