FEATURE:
Spotlight
PHOTO CREDIT: Lissyelle Laricchia
and talented acts in modern music, Magdalena Bay have just released one of this year’s most best albums. An instant classic. Imaginal Disk was released on 23rd August and has received unanimous praise. This incredible duo hail from Miami, Florida and are based in Los Angeles, California. Consisting of Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin, Magdalena Bay have released two studio albums, three E.P.s, and three mixtapes (called Mini Mixes) - comprised of one-to-two-minute songs with accompanying homemade green-screen music videos. Their music has evolved quite a bit since their earliest work. I wanted to draw attention to a duo who are getting a lot of attention but might not been known to everyone. Magdalena Bay are coming to London on 13th November. Prior to that, they are touring through North America. You can purchase tickets here. I am going to end with a couple of interviews for Imaginal Disk. It is a concept album that is really fascinating. Rare for an act to put out a concept album in this day. There are examples, though most studio albums released are a lot straighter and tend not to have a conceptual arc. I am going to start with a few recent interviews. So we can get more detail and background about Magdalena Bay and their stunning second studio album, Imaginal Disk. A duo whose new album twins Pop and Prog-Rock. Vogue’s interview gives us some insight into this incredible two-piece:
“In the current pop landscape, there are few acts as exciting—or as remarkably consistent—as Magdalena Bay. The duo, made up of Matt Lewin and Mica Tenenbaum, high school buddies turned partners in life and work, have spent the best part of a decade quietly churning out slices of synth-pop genius, married with distinctive visuals created by the pair themselves. That journey culminated in their debut album, 2021’s Mercurial World: One of the year’s most inventive pop records, it served as a rollercoaster ride through the band’s eclectic sonic universe, while also boasting some of the catchiest hooks in recent memory. (Seriously: Three years later, I still can’t get “Hysterical Us” out of my head.) Why, then, have they remained something of an in-the-know favorite for pop fanatics, when in a more just world their singles would be topping charts?
Their second album, Imaginal Disk—released tomorrow—may change all that. Across 15 all-killer, no-filler tracks, the duo flex their preternatural instincts for writing an irresistible pop melody, while also venturing into uncharted territory. The theatrical sweep of lead single “Death and Romance”—all groovy, ABBA-esque keyboards and thundering drums—flirts with psych-rock, while the delightfully bonkers “Tunnel Vision” builds and builds with Tenenbaum’s cherubic vocals over twinkling piano before it erupts into a epic prog-rock breakdown of guitars and live drums, synths squiggling around them like fireflies. And you’d be hard-pressed to find a catchier, cleverer slice of pop perfection than “Image” on any other record this year.
“It’s conceptual, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it a concept album,” says Lewin when he and Tenenbaum dial in from their Los Angeles studio. (In the background, their walls are covered with guitars and a Memphis Group-inspired sculpture the pair sourced from Facebook Marketplace.) While in the past, their visuals have consisted of a charmingly chaotic mish-mash of the post-Internet and the new-age—their old website was inspired by the Y2K kitsch of GeoCities pages—this time around, there’s a greater focus on the world they’ve constructed around the record, with an overarching narrative following an alien called True (played by Tenenbaum in the videos) who is implanted with, then rejects, an “imaginal disk” and begins her journey towards understanding what it is to be human.
It somehow never feels overwrought, or like the pair are being bogged down by the more outré aspects of what they’re doing. Indeed, when you boil it down, the appeal of Magdalena Bay is actually fairly simple: they’ve got fantastic melodies, immaculate production, and a welcome lack of self-seriousness. Because as any great pop songwriter knows, there’s a genius to simplicity—and Imaginal Disk is nothing if not a window into the minds of two weird and wonderful geniuses at work.
Here, Magdalena Bay talk about their unique take on the classic concept album, why they returned to their high-school roots when it came to the record’s influences, and their plans to bring the Imaginal Disk world to life while on the road.
Vogue: How are you feeling right now, a couple of weeks out from the release of the album?
Matt Lewin: I think we’re just eager to get the whole thing out, because you do the singles and it’s heartbreaking—well, not heartbreaking, but it’s a tough process, because you really just want people to listen to it all the way through. So you give people these little tastes of it, but you feel like you’re not getting the full thing. We’re ready for all of it to be out.
Mica Tenenbaum: Very ready.
Given it’s something of a concept album, what came first: the songs or the concept?
MT: At first, the music.
ML: The songs always come first.
MT: But I was entertaining some concepts while we wrote the songs. Because with Mercurial World, it was very much a case of songs first, concept later. So I did want to keep those broader ideas in mind when working on this one, without necessarily forcing anything.
ML: I would say it’s like a loose concept album. It’s not like a Tommy situation where the songs outline the story. I think there are themes throughout the album, but I feel that’s the same with Mercurial World. It’s conceptual but I wouldn’t necessarily call it a concept album. I don’t know if you agree, Mica?
MT: I think I agree. We just started writing the music in between touring gaps, the little time we would have at home in LA. Maybe 60% of it was written that way, and then we had a dedicated chunk of time to finish the rest of it, which was nice.
ML: I think once we had the music and we had the sequencing and we listened through the record, we were like, “Well, we could overlay this story on top of the music”—and that’s the story of the visuals. But it’s not necessarily inextricably tied to the music, it’s just a layer of meaning on top of the record.
Where did the Imaginal Disk title come from, and what does it mean to you both, exactly?
MT: I think we first came across the title because I was just really... Wait, how did we find the stuff about the insects in the first place?
ML: It was almost reverse engineered, because we came up with the album cover concept first, so we had this idea of someone inserting a disk into someone’s forehead. Then I think separately Mica was reading about the caterpillar-butterfly metamorphosis process, and there is a biological term called an imaginal disc, but with a C, which is a genetic code carrier that exists within the caterpillar that basically once the caterpillar completely melts into a goo in the cocoon these imaginal discs are the instructions with how to rebuild it into the butterfly. So then it became this double entendre with the CD disk concept that we had for the cover, and this symbol of metamorphosis that tied into a lot of the themes that Mica was already writing about and had in mind for the record.
MT: The cover came first? I’m not convinced by that.
ML: I swear!
Those themes of transition and evolution definitely recur throughout the record. Was there anything specific going on in your lives while making it that drew you to those questions?
MT: I had restarted therapy. It’s interesting, because when I was in high school I would go to the same therapist, so I returned to her a bajillion years later—I’m from Argentina, and the therapist I go to is from a Lacanian school of psychoanalysis, which is very hip now. I’m not super educated on those details, it just feels like what I imagine regular therapy is, but with a lot more focus and importance placed on dreams and the subconscious, which I find really inspiring as an artist. When we were talking, there were a lot of big questions coming up—and the record ended up being about the big questions too.
ML: I remember you were asking me all these questions like, “What do you think forms your identity? Are you the same person that you were when you were 10 years old? What really exists and what’s the through-line between your consciousness?” Because you feel like a completely different person, and it feels like almost a different life from a child version of yourself to the adult version of yourself, so what really constitutes you? What’s the ship where eventually every part of the ship was replaced?
MT: I was just reading about that, I forget what it’s called.
ML: It’s still the same ship if at some point every single piece of it was replaced over time. So it led to these questions of what constitutes the self—what is the core of that?
Was the character of True based on yourself in any way, Mica?
MT: She’s based on me, for sure. I feel like the lyrics within themselves have their own logic and story, and they are complete and intact in a way. And then we’ve layered this story over it, which is also informed by the lyrics. So it’s almost like another version of me. It’s the sci-fi interpretation of the personal story the lyrics tell.
It’s always pretty tough to pin you down in terms of genre, but one of the things that stood out to me was the really epic prog-rock moments on the album. Was there anything specific that led you down that path this time around?
ML: I think it was just a shift in what we were listening to at the time. We reverted to a lot of what we listened to when we were in high school when we first met, which is a lot of classic rock, ’70s prog-rock, Radiohead. I think when we were making Mercurial World we were really tapped into the contemporary pop scene and were really inspired by that, but the wave we were on while we were writing Imaginal Disk was very different and I’m sure that made its way into the music. It also ended up being that a lot of the songs required live drums rather than electronic programming, and I think that helped a lot to shape the sound of the record and push it in a different direction.
It definitely lends the album a very epic quality. Did you set out when writing the record to go bigger and bolder in that sense?
MT: I don’t know if it was conscious.
ML: Yeah. It’s hard to pin down why. I feel like some bands are like, “Okay, we’re going to make our disco record,” and before they even get in the studio they’re like, “I have a vision for how the record is going to sound.” But I feel like our writing style is that we just get into a flow state and then something comes out, and all the little micro-decisions you make while writing are informed by your tastes at the time, and then it ends up formulating into a song”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Lissyelle Laricchia
I want to move on to a great interview from Stereogum. Magdalena Bay discuss how Flash Gordon, Peter Gabriel, Björk’s Dancer in the Dark score and other influence go into their stunning high-concept conceptual album, Imaginal Disk. If you have not heard of the duo and any of their music, then I seriously suggest you have to. They are going to be a massive festival act very soon. With each new release, they are establishing themselves as one of the most spectacular and original acts around. I am a fairly recent convert to their music:
“Magdalena Bay are bringing back the heady concept album. Much of contemporary pop music is concerned with past trauma, astrological signs, and capital-V Vulnerability, and it feels like ridiculously conceptual pop music has fallen to the wayside in lieu of self-mythologization and not-so-subtle autobiography. On the other hand, the pop duo comprising Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin made a record about a character named True, whose body rejects a “disk upgrade” forced into their forehead by aliens, designed to bridge the speculative connections between humans and apes. Or something like that.
The album in question — Imaginal Disk, out this Friday — underlines a different type of vulnerability, one in which truly believing in your outlandish ideas pays off to the highest extent. The whole narrative is as unapologetically weird as the music is relentlessly catchy. If Grimes wasn’t up to whatever the hell she’s doing right now and went back to making excellent synth-pop in the vein of Art Angels, then it would probably sound something like Magdalena Bay.
Still, the ideas presented here are entirely Tenenbaum and Lewin’s own. Even aside from the sci-fi story bred into the record, the music itself is immaculate. It refines on the solid, shimmery foundation the two established on their debut, 2021’s Mercurial World, by somehow making their world even more mercurial. These songs take twists and turns that mirror the futuristic bent of the lyrics, and it’s immediately memorable despite its thrilling unpredictability. The Miami-bred, Los Angeles-based musicians double down on their ideas here, and it’s refreshing to hear glimmering pop music that is this unafraid of itself, carving its own singular path.
It makes you wonder where one even gets these kinds of ideas in the first place, so it only seemed natural to probe Lewin and Tenenbaum’s brains about the inspirations that led to Imaginal Disk. In a wide-ranging conversation, the duo shared how Suspiria (1977), Fiona Apple, ELO, the Unarius Academy of Science, and more influenced their excellent new album. Below, press play on new single “That’s My Floor” and enter the world of Magdalena Bay.
Paul McCartney
MICA TENENBAUM: I got into my first Beatles phase and then Paul McCartney phase in 2022, which would have been right as we were starting to write the album. So that’s probably some sort of influence, right?
MATTHEW LEWIN: Yeah, it was fun. I’ve been a lifelong Beatles guy, and it was fun to go chronologically through their discography with Mica.
TENENBAUM: I remember it was right when that documentary came out, which was so fun. I’ve been obsessed with Ram ever since.
Get Back is what made you dive in?
LEWIN: It came out right when we were starting to go through chronologically. So it was probably what brought it up for me. I was like, “You should probably get familiar with the history to appreciate it.”
Is Paul your favorite Beatle, then?
TENENBAUM: Yes, I think so.
LEWIN: I’ve always been a George guy my whole life, and then I think Paul took over as my favorite in the last maybe five years or so or during this deep dive we’ve done.
The documentary kind of portrays him as this mastermind behind the whole enterprise. And George is just like, “I want to be more involved.” And he’s like, “No, do what you’re told.”
LEWIN: For sure. It’s kind of annoying. But he’s good, which makes him annoying is that he’s undeniably good. [laughs] What can you do?
We rely on reader subscriptions to deliver articles like the one you’re reading. Become a member and help support independent media!
Fiona Apple
TENENBAUM: We’ve been Fiona Apple fans for a long, long, long time. And in high school, when we were in a progressive rock band together, she was a very big songwriting influence for me. So it aligns with this situation where, as we were starting to write this album, we were listening more to what we were listening to in high school and revisiting things and regressing a little bit. [laughs] We totally stopped listening to any contemporary music and delved into Fiona Apple, a little bit of Radiohead, and some ’70s stuff. I feel like, in some way, she might have influenced the songwriting a little bit more than some previous Magdalena Bay stuff.
Björk’s Score For Dancer In The Dark
Is Björk also within that, as you put it, regressive high school era?
LEWIN: We watched Dancer In The Dark, which was new for me. I’d never seen it before even though I was into Björk for a while. That’s one of the things where we picked up on little elements, like the opener track to that film score is just this beautiful horn arrangement. It’s like, French horns and trombones and all brass. In that aspect, it really made us want to include more orchestral brass on this album, and there are a few songs on it that were pretty directly inspired by that and in some of the brass arrangements. I guess it’s probably not an overall songwriting influence. It’s more just like little things here and there.
Donkey Skin
TENENBAUM: We’re fairly inspired by that visually, just the sets and the color. As we’ve been working on our videos, films in that vein have been a big source of inspiration for us.
LEWIN: There’s something about the color palette or the set design. We were watching just generally the way film looked in that era of late ’60s and ’70s. It’s not something that we are following directly because our music videos don’t have that. They’re filmed on green screen, so we don’t have those practical status backdrops, but hopefully there’s something we’re taking from that because we do love it so much.
TENENBAUM: So whether it’s the color treatment or just some sort of mood, there’s some inspiration going through.
Peter Gabriel Music Videos
LEWIN: Obviously “Sledgehammer” is the big Peter Gabriel video that everyone knows and loves. But you have to watch the video for “Steam.”
TENENBAUM: That might be my favorite, I gotta say.
LEWIN: It’s like peak early CGI craziness; it looks so horrible but so cool at the same time. “Sledgehammer” is amazing because it’s all stop-motion, and you can see the frame-by-frame work. It has such a nice look to it. But “Steam” is just so cool in a completely opposite way where it’s so obviously digital. There’s something really funny and cool about that”.
Before getting onto some reviews, there is another interview that I am keen to highlight. The Line of Best Fit spoke with an amazing duo who are keen to defy your expectations. The Line of Best Fit sat down with Magdalena Bay and chatted about conceptualism and weirdness in Pop. For a duo who some might feel are eccentric or have an oddness, Travis Shosa notes how the conversation with Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin was one of the most normal of the past year:
“Imaginal Disk, the duo’s new album, is the fruit of that desire to marry accessibility with eclecticism. It is patently the most “out there” thing Tenenbaum and Lewin have recorded together, precisely because it is neither normal nor strange, but instead a heated wrestling match between pop convention and the more fanciful tangents and progressions that threaten to twist pop’s form up like a pretzel. There’s no “Killshot”: there’s really not even a “Secrets (Your Fire)” or “Hysterical Us.” Which is to say that the simple immediacy that some fans might be expecting from Mag Bay has been traded for songs readily shift and sprawl out from their origin points, placing a greater emphasis on soundscapes, new vocal techniques, and oddly layered rhythms. In a sense, it’s Tenenbaum and Lewin re-engaging with their musical roots and working out what place they have in their music going forward.
Mag Bay swung hard with the album’s first music video back in June: an eight-minute off-kilter sci-fi odyssey for “Death & Romance” and what would later be revealed as its unofficial outro, “Fear, Sex.” Tenenbaum plays a character named True, who spends most of the video gyrating in a spatially displaced aquamarine bedroom or in the foreground of some uncanny bucolic scenery. Lewin is a being of pure light: the two kiss, and Tenenbaum gets some of the light stuck in her mouth. All the while, they’re being monitored by aliens or gimps or alien gimps, and they attempt to kidnap this being of pure light before he escapes in his UFO, leaving True behind. Then she gets “updated” with what is presumed to be the titular Imaginal Disk.
That the video is bizarre isn’t surprising: Magdalena Bay has established a bent towards the absurd early on through their TikTok clips and full mini mix videos. Rather, it’s the style and grandiosity of the song itself which is striking. “Death & Romance” is effectively the best baggy revival tune since George Clanton’s “I Been Young,” though if that song is for swaying lighters at the club, “Death & Romance” is a big, bombastic epic that launches itself into the cosmos. Synths crop up, but the core instrumental hook is built around these punchy piano chords and the choppy drums that shuffle underneath. It’s catchy in the way that pop often is, but it’s also a bit disorienting. Mag Bay has a habit of nestling little references into their lyrics and melodies (see the pseudo-interpolation of Madonna’s “Material Girl” on their first album’s title track, “Mercurial World”). Here, the “wires in your head” line calls back to Pink Floyd’s “If.”
Lewin more directly compares “Image” to another of Gabriel’s videos. “You have to check it out if you haven’t seen the video for ‘Steam.’ ‘Sledgehammer’ is super claymation, very analog. ‘Steam’ is like, Peter Gabriel fucking around with early ‘90s CGI.”
Tenenbuam chimes in with, “‘Steam’ is like, so weird, yeah?”
And while Imaginal Disk’s mysterious and alien aesthetic and sense of atmosphere might be more closely aligned with Roger Waters-era Pink Floyd, it’s Gabriel’s writing with Genesis that seems to most closely inform the writing on the album’s proggier cuts, such as “Tunnel Vision.” Gabriel’s had a gift for imbuing his dense compositions with a sense of lightness and levity, and Mag Bay does the same here with its delicate but tightly layered and constantly evolving synth lines. By the time the track reaches its back half, however, it melts down into this swathe of heavy droning, frantic drum fills, and squelching electronics. I remember lines from “Image” that get me hunting down timestamps: the first chorus makes a reference to “22 more minutes.” A minute later, the next chorus kicks in “21 more minutes.” This feels like the initiation of a countdown. So I go to check what comes 22 minutes after that first chorus and “Image.” It’s that back-half breakdown in “Tunnel Vision” which leads into the album’s next act. It’s the reboot, the “brand new image.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Lissyelle Laricchia
Tenenbaum and Lewin don’t deny Imaginal Disk’s conceptual nature, but they do sort of undersell it. “The way it makes sense in my mind is these layers of meaning… the album within itself is just an exploration of self and consciousness, and is quite personal in some ways,” says Tenenbaum. “But of course, we love to sprinkle in the sci-fi within the lyrics and narrative and storytelling.”
Regarding the narrative of the album versus the story being told through the videos, Lewin adds: “It’s like another interpretation of it. It's not like we’re not doing like Tommy or something where the album is the story and very intrinsically one in the same. And you could listen to the album like you’re watching the movie. I think for us, the idea is the album exists on its own, as its own piece of art, and then the videos that we’re making are one interpretation of that.”
Tenenbaum concedes that she is inspired by vocalists that are more naturally aligned with her range. “But I think on this record, I was trying to expand that a bit, and I was listening a lot to Paul McCartney and David Bowie. And of course, I’m never gonna sound like them. But I’m trying to pick up on what I can, whether that’s the tiniest things, like enunciation, or a certain earnestness or more bravado on others. I try to think less about gender and style constraints, and just more about a character, depending on what a song is saying.”
Characters — multiple — are at the center Imaginal Disk, despite Tenenbaum boiling the record down to an exploration of self. “I think “Angel On a Satellite” feels very like me.” I hang on that a bit, mainly the uncertainty of it. “Maybe to me, at least. Someone else might listen to it, and I just think it sounds like me, but in my head — where I have a huge microscope on every sound that comes out of my mouth, it sounds a little different to me than what I’ve sung before. Like, more raw, more natural, a little lower in my register. Maybe more Fiona Apple-inspired. I don’t sound anything like her, but I’m trying to channel that more natural delivery.” I find myself stuck on the idea of channeling naturalism. “And then in “Cry for Me,” she continues, “where I’m singing in a different way at the end — more dramatic and shouting — that’s another type of character there. I mean, like, literal character, but also character to the voice.”
The best I can piece together is that Imaginal Disk involves multiple personified facets or aspects of Tenenbaum’s perceived self. We could go as far as to call Imaginal Disk “Jungian.” While there’s no specific admittance that True from the videos is one of the characters of the album itself — at least in a literal sense — the symbology of the name itself can’t really be ignored. If I were to theorycraft, Imaginal Disk seems to be a metaphor for working through a personality crisis. Are Mag Bay up-and-coming pop stars or are they still the Genesis heads from a decade and a half ago? Tenenbaum’s shifted her vocal style so much since then that she has to “channel” her natural register. And there’s a sort of duality between horror and wonder between realising you can be whoever you want to be, but you might lose sight of “True” along the way.
But again, Imaginal Disk seems to be about rectifying that. Some fans have playfully referred to the disk insertion in the “Death & Romance” video as a lobotomy. But Occam’s razor dictates I look at it as software: an appropriate Internet-age representation of how our minds develop over time. We patch out bugs and create new ones, add new features, etc. Some features are worth reimplementing”.
I am going to end with some reviews. In their five-star write-up, NME examined post-Internet existentialism on the duo’s second studio album. An album that “captures the visionaries at their most expansive: kaleidoscopic and overproduced in all the right ways”. I think that Imaginal Disk is going to voted as one of the best albums of this year very soon. It is a phenomenal work that everyone needs to hear:
“You are formless, yet you are still you,” write LA synth-pop duo Magdalena Bay on the eerie corridors of the darkly sci-fi website that accompanies their second album, ‘Imaginal Disk’. It’s the sort of metaphysical, techno-spiritual world-building fans expect: today’s alt-pop is no stranger to otherworldly e-girl pantomime and puzzling fictional websites, and Magdalena Bay’s expands upon their mysterious universe.
Over five years, Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin’s vaporwave fantasia has spanned post-internet mysticism and new-age philosophies. Their acclaimed debut, 2021’s ‘Mercurial World’ – a surreal silvery disco that landed somewhere between Grimes and Chvrches – was cacophonous and maximalist hyperspace pop, vast and unending. Satire and sincerity drove their Y2K retro-futurist vision, where the overstimulating internet became a portal to self-discovery. Their chops garnered a credit on the debut EP from TWICE‘s Jihyo, and even Lil Yachty got Magdalena-fever on 2023’s ‘Running Out of Time’.
Across the kitschy pilgrimage of its cerebral follow-up ‘Imaginal Disk’, Tenenbaum and Lewin further consolidate this lore, but cracks in the matrix – the real world, the negative effects of being terminally online, etc – threaten the euphoria of online escapism. It’s soundtracked by the same anachronistic, trippy synth-pop of its predecessor but grounded by the busk-y tambourine and analogue percussion of indie-pop.
There’s an artful slant thanks to Chairlift-indebted avant-pop, yet it’s never pretentious or – despite its sci-fi narrative – too concerned with the future. It’s still innovative, mind, but where ‘Mercurial World’ was informed by modern pop, ‘Imaginal Disk’ avoids the influence of new music almost entirely, according to press material.
Nostalgic instrumentation softens the synth-pop edge of ‘Imaginal Disk’, which has the added benefit of cementing its instant timelessness, imbuing the record with a campy, psychedelic, maudlin approach – one that feels all the more interesting as a counter to minimalist, bratty, party pop.
While gothic, theatrical St Vincent-ish vocals infatuate the wistful ‘Vampire in the Corner’, a Woodstock shrooms trip inspires the hypnotic delusion of the satirical ‘Love is Everywhere’ (which interpolates that sun-drenched Lil Yachty cut). Then, an 80s-inspired, I Saw the TV Glow-coded monster stalks the accompanying video for indie-disco track ‘Image’; celestial horns and echo chambers usher soft-pop armageddon on the unravelling groove-rock of standout ‘Tunnel Vision’, and Tenenbaum is a dancefloor deity on noughties grunge banger ‘That’s My Floor’.
By the time the technicolour show-stopper ‘The Ballad of Mica and Matt’ reprises the cutesy melody of its earthbound, pacifist opener ‘She Looked Like Me!’, it’s crystal that ‘Imaginal Disk’ captures the visionaries at their most expansive, yet corporeal. Stylishly gauche and expertly overproduced, kaleidoscopically experimental and expressionistic, ‘Imaginal Disk’ is a zeitgeisty time capsule of anxious post-internet existentialism and the online condition observed through a synthy flower-power lens. Here, Magdalena Bay are underrated pop messiahs at the top of their game”.
The final review is from The Line of Best Fit. Giving it 9/10, they salute a duo “discovering their sci-fi synthpop niche”. Even if you are not a fan of this type of music, I guarantee that you will love Imaginal Disk. The more you listen to it, the more it grows on you. It is very much a modern-day great that will rank alongside the best albums of the decade. It will be exciting when Magdalena Bay come to the U.K. as they have a large and growing fanbase here:
“A pairing of metaphors this nerdy – one deriving from the process of metamorphosis, the other pulled straight out of the science fiction canon – is par for the course for Matthew Lewin and Mica Tenenbaum, the precocious young duo that makes up Magdalena Bay. The two started out in a prog band in high school before realizing that nobody listens to prog anymore. At least, nobody that they cared about. So instead, as they went on to study at the most elite universities in the United States, they dropped their band entirely and swapped inspirations from art-rock to Top 40 radio in search of notoriety. Making synthpop would be simple, they thought – after all, they had spent their time writing insane twenty-minute jams moving in and out of 7/4 time, and what’s a short radio bop compared to that?
It could have been that easy. But Matt and Mica never quite discovered how to be normal, and eventually, it seemed like they didn’t want to. Even on their debut album and (many) other releases, the duo’s pop music paid homage to and subverted the pop zeitgeist in the same breath. They put Mariah Carey-esque love songs back-to-back with EDM slow-burners back-to-back with shoegaze-y pop rock, stitched together by song transitions smooth enough to make their releases appear more like megamixes (or, sometimes, literal “mini mix”es that they released as EPs). The elements of pop were there – verse-chorus-verse structures, hooks that would get stuck in your head for months, et cetera – but they were augmented with something more unique and artsy. Call it music theory geekery, or a lingering desire to make something as grand as their past work. But whatever that quality is, it has blossomed to full fruition on their sophomore album: prog-rock or otherwise, this is the most weird, complex music they’ve ever made. Imaginal Disk is a testament to good old-fashioned artistry – it’s the product of a band intensely honing what they want to sound like and ending up with a style so unique that it’s barely possible to describe. It’s dorky and strange and dramatic, like the duo themselves. And it sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard.
Imaginal Disk is held together by a loose concept: a character named True being coerced into getting a disk inserted into her head, leading to the creation of a new parallel being. This story is explored extensively throughout the surreal music videos released alongside many of the album’s singles. But that concept isn’t strictly important to the album: the band told Best Fit that the album is a broad “exploration of self and consciousness” and that the videos’ overarching narrative acts as a complementary interpretation of the album’s themes. By that framing, Imaginal Disk looks less like a sci-fi rock opera and more like just a collection of pop songs centered around a common theme. But the album still feels like something larger than the sum of its parts.
Perhaps that’s because the whole album, unlike anything Magdalena Bay has made before, has a unified aesthetic. That’s not to say that the album is homogeneous – anything but. Trying to describe this album in terms of its contemporaries, I only ended up with meaningless word salad: Age of Adz-era Sufjan Stevens if he made space rock revival, the Pet Shop Boys covering ABBA, every Kero Kero Bonito song mashed into one. Despite that, every track on Imaginal Disk somehow manages to sound like the same album.
Part of that is Mica’s distinctively airy vocals, part of it is the wash of psychedelia that coats every track in a hypnagogic aura. It’s also because everything on Imaginal Disk, no matter the sound, is turned up to 11. The lyricism is musical-theater levels of dramatic, and the instrumentals match that vibe – the raging distorted guitars swallowing the mix on “That’s My Floor,” the crunchiness on the final chorus of “Image,” the 80s string-synth-drum-machine combo on “Cry For Me”. Magdalena Bay’s past work had that same bombastic vibe, but when it’s surrounded by a unified theme and aesthetic, it feels so much more gratifying.
As great as Magdalena Bay’s previous releases were – and they were great – they didn’t exactly have a sound, as much as they were good at every sound. By contrast, in press releases, Lewin said that the process of creating Imaginal Disk was realizing “what a Magdalena Bay song sounds and feels like.” On one hand, that sounds like nonsense, because the album barely has a consistent genre. Even calling this “synthpop” feels like a disservice. But Imaginal Disk still feels like a band discovering their voice.
If I had to describe this album’s ethos, perhaps it wouldn’t be that far from the truth: it’s a prog-rock band making pop music and refusing to compromise on the best qualities of either. There are weird key changes and genre modulations and grandiose stories packed throughout this whole album, right next to some of the catchiest hooks of the year and danceable rhythms and nostalgic 90s-throwback material. It’s avant-garde, catchy, accessible, confusing, and fantastical, all in the best ways. It’s fitting that the album’s biological namesake is a metaphor for evolution, because Imaginal Disk sees Magdalena Bay channeling their overflowing creative energy into something novel – in a way, like an animal metamorphosing and inheriting its full body”.
Go and follow Magdalena Bay. They are an incredible duo have released one of this year’s best albums. Imaginal Disk is a brilliant introduction to them. I would suggest also going back to the start though. Not just listening to Imaginal Disk. Even though Magdalena Bay are rising and have an army of loving fans, there are some that are unaware of their brilliance. Make sure that you check out this duo…
STRAIGHT away.
__________
Follow Magdalena Bay
