Magdalena Bay Want to Feel It All

Picture this: You’re an average teen walking down the street to your average suburban high school, until a UFO made of clay soars across the sky. Its lasers wave with a VHS wrinkle, and it sucks you into its alternate universe of color and demented logic. Or: You’re at home, watching the TV, blank-eyed against its ice-blue light. Suddenly you’re inside the set, befriending the creatures of your favorite show. Or: You wake up one morning in your classic 1990s teenage bedroom (Britney poster on the wall, obviously) to find that you now have light blue skin and telepathic powers. The world is the same, but you’re in a tangential, unsettling variation on it.

These are the kinds of myths that Magdalena Bay—the art-pop duo of Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin—construct: stories with the unsettling feeling of a Disney Channel Original gone horribly wrong. With colors, claymation and handmade costumes, the Magdalena Bay universe is somewhere in-between the coordinates of Y2K and vaporwave. It’s familiar and, yet, stranger than ever. The plot doesn’t matter. It’s visual. It’s an abstraction. Death and romance hold equal potential.

“Meet your brand-new image,” Tenenbaum advertises on “Image,” the second single from Magdalena Bay’s sophomore album, Imaginal Disk. On the album cover, a gleaming, monstrous hand inserts a disk into Tenenbaum’s head like a CD-ROM lobotomy. Imaginal Disk is a wide, swirling, hazy record that ventures between heady psych trips and funky, lilty pop songs. It doubles down the Pop Rocks-textured sugar-rush that made the duo’s 2021 debut, Mercurial World, an instant cult-classic, but they also indulge their own prog-rock adventurousness. It’s a welcome return to the brilliant, absurdist, and endlessly fun scapes of Mercurial World.

Magdalena Bay’s work is driven by nostalgia, but they never venture into pastiche. “It could be in a chord progression. It could be in a sound. It could be in a vocal cadence,” Tenenbaum says. “There’s so many ways to communicate that [sense of nostalgia].” Lesser artists would use the same palette—tape filters, 8-bit synths and fantasy costumes—and come across reductive. But Tenenbaum and Lewin use these tools out of genuine love, not just as a ‘90s kid cosplay. “Our aesthetic sensibilities tend to be nostalgic,” Lewin admits. “But it’s just the kind of stuff we like looking at and listening to. It’s taking something and putting the film grain effect over it. There’s just something appealing about that to us. It is nostalgia, but it’s also not. [To us], it’s a lot more appealing to look at than the full, high-def, crisp, HD-ness.”

This puts Magdalena Bay in a similar camp to another late ‘90s sci-fi revivalist, the filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun, whose recent flick I Saw the TV Glow is as beloved as it is polarizing. “As soon as we posted the first visual, everyone was like, ‘Oh, this is like I Saw The TV Glow.’ And we’re like, ‘Oh, I guess that means we need to watch this now,’” Lewin says. There’s a shared DNA between I Saw The TV Glow and Imaginal Disk’s visuals—a cord shared between light-hearted sci-fi and the uncanny valley, usage of practical costuming and a static fuzz running through their art. “Certain things are just going to naturally feel right to you because of how old you were either as a teenager or five years old or whatever,” Lewin continues.

Throughout their work, Magdalena Bay blur the line between playfulness and mystery. “Matt and I were talking about this yesterday because we were listening to King Crimson,” Tenenbaum says. “And I was like, ‘Whoah, I feel like maybe they’re the only really cool prog band.’ The way it just sounds is dark and serious and very cool. And it’s got this smokiness to it. And that is very different from, like, Genesis, which is whimsical. So I asked Matt, ‘Do you think we’re more whimsical or serious? Matt said ‘whimsical.’ Yeah, I do too.” “For us, we like to be melodramatic in the music,” Lewin clarifies. “We like to not take it super seriously, but I also think we do straddle this line between ‘serious music’ and ‘humor.” Magdalena Bay is a band capable of selling a lyric like “And if you know the movie Wild At Heart / Yeah, I can be like the girl in Wild At Heart” just as effectively as the friendship-in-turmoil anthem “Chaeri.”

“It’s not a joke to us,” Tenenbaum chimes in. “We take it seriously, so there is this earnest quality built into it. But a lot of our favorite music is able to do that. I think that’s what we’re trying to accomplish in a weird subconscious way.” In everything Magdalena Bay does, it’s a “balance of whimsy and earnestness and seriousness and obviously not self-importance, but taking yourself a little bit seriously, just not too much,” as Lewin puts it.

Magdalena Bay have plenty of mystery, too. The music videos for Imaginal Disk center around Tenenbaum’s CD lobotomy, a character in a star-shaped mask and a host of backdrops ranging from a rainbow pastoral to a demented waiting room. There’s enough intrigue to suggest a narrative arc, but it’s too ambiguous to gather from one watch. Fans try to dissect the plot on Reddit and Discord, but the band remains elusive on what goes on in Imaginal Disk: “There’s really endless stories that could go with the lyrics and the music, whether it’s personal to someone listening to it or personal to me writing the lyrics or whether it’s this other music video world that we’re putting over it,” Tenenbaum says. Lewin agrees, contending that the duo are “trying to tell this story, but it’s not necessarily the story of the album.” “And it’s only one story of the album,” he continues. “We don’t want it to be a prescriptive story where it’s like, ‘This is what the album is.’ It’s all just one interpretation of it.”

Tenenbaum and Lewin cited progressive rock as influences on Mercurial World, but they lean into the genre’s tendency towards excessive, multi-movement songs on Imaginal Disk. However, they avoid prog’s pitfalls of self-indulgence and abstraction. “If you talk about the prototypical excessive prog rock records that people like, Close to the Edge by Yes is cool, right?” Lewin asks. “But then you go to Tales from Topographic Oceans and you jump the shark in a way that people can sense. And they stop thinking it’s cool.” (For fellow progressive rock fans, Magdalena Bay agrees on the following: Genesis? Goofy. King Crimson? Cool. Rush? Goofy. Yes? It depends.)

Imaginal Disk amps up the conceptual nature of their work, but Magdalena Bay never “jump the shark” and lose their signature goofiness. “When we were writing the Imaginal Disk songs,” Tenenbaum says, “we felt less tied to the classic pop structure of a song. We were more wanting to play with that a little bit. Whereas, with Mercurial World, it was a little more structured. I think, just for us, it’s a natural progression post-Mercurial World, wanting to do something differently.”

In the making of Imaginal Disk, the duo had moments where they found themselves too self-serious, but they have that internal compass to course-correct. “It’s very disturbing. There’s one demo I’m thinking of in particular that sounded good. Like, there was nothing wrong with it, and it was a fine song, but it sounded like it was taking itself too seriously. It just felt like it was not us. And it’s so hard to put that into words, but it was just too—,” Tenenbaum says, before trailing off. They have a refined sense of what is and what is not Magdalena Bay. “It’s always in that direction though,” Lewin adds. “I feel like we’re never like, “Oh, we’re being too silly here.’ That usually never happens naturally, but there are moments where this is just feeling a little too self-serious.” Tenenbaum sums it up: “Like trying to be too cool and then it’s not cool.”

Imaginal Disk, like Mercurial World before it, is music-first. Lewin insists that the band is “always music first.” “We write the music and then we figure out how it all fits together,” he furthers. “And usually, we’re on some sort of wave when we’re writing music. There’s a natural tie-in with all the songs together because of where our heads are at when we’re writing them.” And where their heads were at? The road. Following 2021’s Mercurial World, which was written and recorded at home during COVID, the band went on a string of tours with a who’s-who of pop music’s best. They opened for Charli xcx’s 2022 CRASH tour, played at Porter Robinson’s annual Second Sky festival and even gigged with Rina Sawayma, along with their own headlining tour and festival sets across the world.

“It was a lot of time spent driving, looking at the road, thinking about stuff,” Tenenbaum says, mysteriously. “Also listening to music,” Lewin cuts in. “It felt really nice to go back to music we used to be obsessed with and re-listen to it with the headspace that comes from more musical experience and life experience. And I think a lot of that probably influenced how we wrote this record.” They listened through Pink Floyd’s entire discography, along with St. Vincent, the Beatles, Fiona Apple and Radiohead—artists who balanced their high-concept art with the groundedness of pop.

And those influences are all over Imaginal Disk. Tenenbaum belts at the end of “Vampire in the Corner” with a Annie Clark-like quiver; “Tunnel Vision” crests into Pink Floydian psych-rock; “Watching T.V.” floats over keys with a Kid A chill. “There’s this one chunk, from ‘Fear and Sex’ through ‘Tunnel Vision,’” Tenenbaum acknowledges, “it always stuck out as being like, ‘Oh. This is a really deep vibe of the album, and it just gets super weird. That’s smack dab in the middle of the record, and that chunk always stood out as probably the biggest departure from our previous stuff.”

“That’s My Floor” is the closest thing Imaginal Disk has to an outlier. “We kind of fitted it in a way we weren’t sure it was going to make sense,” Lewin says. “And we had a lot of doubts. But we were sequencing it and we were like, ‘No, this is pretty cool here.’ And thank God they kept “That’s My Floor” in. With its growling bassline and cheeky, synthy post-chorus, it’s a callback to the tight pop songs of Mercurial World and it’s bound to be a fan favorite.

With Imaginal Disk, Magdalena Bay are pushing themselves out of their comfort zone. You get the sense that, if they wanted to, they could churn out more Mini Mixes (their series of EPs with succinct pop tunes) or replicate the neon glow of Mercurial World. But that’s not what this band is about. “We never want to repeat ourselves,” says Lewin. “There’s these little micro-decisions you make when you’re writing a song. It’s not like you go into a song and be like, ‘This has to be different from Mercurial World.’ But, you make thousands of decisions when you’re making a record—some consciously and some unconsciously. A lot of those decisions ended up presenting themselves in a certain way, because we were like, ‘Well, we can’t do this again because we did that before.’ That’s always something that’s in the back of our heads.”

Whether it’s through the intrigue of their videos or the space-rock of the music, Imaginal Disk, like Mercurial World, encourages you to enter their fantastical, silly and dark universe and linger there. “They say the music you discover when you’re 13 or 14 is the music you’ll always think of as the peak,” Lewin says. “I feel like, when teenagers listen to music, they really like—.” Tenenbaum finishes her bandmate’s thought: “They really really feel it. I’m so jealous. I want that again.” Between its ‘90s-inspired look and the influence of childhood favorites, Imaginal Disk is an album Magdalena Bay would’ve loved as teenagers. This one is for the people who are going to spend the time and “really, really feel it.”

Watch Magdalena Bay’s Paste Session from 2020 below.

Andy Steiner is a writer, musician, and works in the music industry. When he’s not reviewing contemporary albums, you can find him collecting ‘80s Rush merchandise. Follow him on Instagram or Twitter.