Magdalena Bay has crafted an aesthetic that rides the border of analog and digital. The California duo’s website turns your cursor into a jpg. Its map screen calls back to point-and-click adventure games. On video, partners Matt Lewin and Mica Tenenbaum often stand before a blue sky and green hills that clearly resemble the iconic Windows XP background. Even the music video for the still-incredible “Killshot” frames itself like old meme image macros. This sort of imagery frequently lands their name next to phrases like “Y2K” and headlines like “Magdalena Bay Are More Online Than You.”
Musically, the duo wears its influences on its sleeve: 2021’s Mercurial World saw them channel Metric on “You Lose!” and tap into bubblegum pop anthems on “The Beginning.” Tenenbaum’s quivering vocals across 2020 EP A Little Rhythm and a Wicked Feeling pay deference to the darker turn of Britney’s In The Zone.
But it’s easy to evoke something. Magdalena Bay is doing something more. What started out as toying with early internet aesthetics has exploded into something singular, incorporating old-testament angels, body horror, the cosmos, and more. Even on their most referential songs, Magdalena Bay’s dense production twists any influence into a wholly new creation. Refusing to be boxed in, the question of genre gets you an eye roll.
After their critically acclaimed debut, opening slots for stars like Charli XCX, and hit “Top Dog” off 2023 EP mini mix vol. 3, Magdalena Bay joined the esteemed company of indie label Mom+Pop (Porter Robinson, Sleater-Kinney, MGMT) earlier this year for their sophomore album, which lands at the height of their popularity.
And they deserve to be there. A stunning, bursting album, Imaginal Disk strikes like an orbital laser to the heart. Magdalena Bay’s gossamer, synth-heavy soundscapes pepper Imaginal Disk with galactic variety—stars are painted over radio chatter on “She Looked Like Me!” (which channels Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman”) dizzying bass pulls you through the kaleidoscopic “Image,” and bone-crunching synth growls give “That’s My Floor” a visceral punch.
As if it needed proving, Imaginal Disk also shows that Magdalena Bay can write one hell of a banger. “Love Is Everywhere” hits a disconcerting, alien funk. “Death & Romance” and “Cry For Me” are cosmic power ballads, and “That’s My Floor” shows off the barn-burning edge that they’ve consistently delivered across projects. Each one is sprinkled with Tenenbaum and Lewin’s stardust production that makes them right at home alongside the album’s more esoteric songs.
But what really makes Imaginal Disk sing is the addition of live piano and drums, which give us solid earth to stand on. Imaginal Disk spends much of its 53 minute run with the metaphysical, bobbing between out-of-body and out-of-planet experiences. But the grand piano and drums (the latter played by Nick Villa, who was in Lewin and Tenenbaum’s high school band) give the record an audible, human fingerprint. The piano shines on “Death & Romance” and “Cry for Me,” two of Imaginal Disk’s strongest songs, playing bold, shimmery chords that bring to mind ABBA’s glistening melancholy (and if there’s anything I love, it’s an ABBA influence).
Magdalena Bay aren’t trying to invent sounds the human ear hasn’t heard before, and they aren’t picking one thread and rolling with it across a whole album like they did for large chunks of Mercurial World—they’re creating a universe of sound and exploring the possibility within it. Each song has a distinct identity, but feels like part of a whole thanks to lyrical and musical motifs and the band’s signature gloss.
Imaginal Disk’s lofty ambitions are held together by its narrative, which explores a character receiving and reckoning with a perfect version of themselves that an alien? god? grants them via an “imaginal disk” to the forehead. If, like me, you Googled “Imaginal Disc,” you probably learned that an imaginal disc is an inner part of a bug larva that unfurls into a body part on its adult form.
What unwinds over the course of three distinct “chapters” is a story about the trap of the perfect self. It’s a concept album, but also semi-autobiographical: Tenenbaum sings about her experience as the child of Argentinian immigrants on the album’s opening track, encountering her younger “Argentine Fabergé” self and reckoning with what her first-generation roots dictate about her own life. Hot-breathed frustration fuels its first two tracks, which see a character looking for blame anywhere but inward for their disatisfaction. An othered kid “hears ghosts singing his name” and “screams at graves” on “She Looked Like Me!” The swaying, grooving pop ode to listlessness “Killing Time” laments “I don’t care if I don’t sleep/But someone better pine for me.”
But there’s no solace in perfection, either. “Image” casts a dark cloud over a narrator shopping for their ideal traits, with a loud drum crash inhumanely slamming like a hydraulic press, forging their perfect self. The refrain of “And you give and you give/’Til it’s all that you have” on “Death & Romance” shows it isn’t enough to keep a new love together.
Two of Imaginal Disk’s most unassuming tracks planted smack in the middle of the record, “Vampire in the Corner” (my personal favorite) and “Watching T.V.” hold the album’s thematic core. Like the vampiric hand that inserts a disk into Tenenbaum’s head on the album art, monster imagery appears across the album. But in these two songs, it takes a turn: Tenenbaum finds love for a fellow monster and slips out of her new skin on “Watching T.V.” to love them better—but quickly rediscovers the fear of vulnerability (“The shadows are near/They know what’s been wrong with you all these years”) and struggles to contain their worst traits on angsty banger “That’s My Floor.” Moments of connection between people are accompanied across the album by energetic bursts in production: Magdalena Bay makes the moral of the story transparently, earnestly clear.
“Cry for Me” stands out as the most powerful song on Imaginal Disk, a sober moment of relenquishing control and realizing that the parts of ourselves we’d most like to discard are the ones that are most core to our identity (“I leave all my dregs to all my progeny”). In the end, tossing out metaphor and narrative, they lay it bare: “All along there was a story/Spare me all the allegories please…Share a little kiss, and that’s forever/Think of love when you remember me.”
Imaginal Disk’s story pretentions don’t get in the way of any one of its tracks independently making you want to move, and only makes them that much more potent when listened to in order.
“Angel On a Satellite” and “The Ballad of Matt & Mica” close out the album with a sunny, airy arrival at self-acceptance. The “stone” curse that Tenenbaum resentfully sang about carrying on “She Looked Like Me!” gets polished, bringing her “past paragon.” But that self-acceptance also marks an end to this era for the band. Mercurial World is an album that loops into itself infinitely, and its closing track “The Beginning” also transitions perfectly into “She Looked Like Me!” But there is no such loop at the end of “The Ballad of Matt & Mica,” implying that they’re ready to move on from their age of confusion and self reckoning and embrace what’s beyond. In a recent interview with The Line of Best Fit, Lewin said “I think what would be a positive thing is if we start to be seen less as a pop group and more like an ‘alternative’ group.”
To Magdalena Bay, information age halmarks like radios and satellites are not the forebears of our current age of disconnection and loneliness. They’re an invitation to reexamine what really connects us to each other and to ourselves. Whatever world Magdalena Bay goes to next, I’m there. Beam me the fuck up.
Two weekends ago I went to a (free!) event at Xanadu roller rink in Bushwick to see Caribou do a live DJ set. I have to admit that I didn’t know about Caribou before this, and I’m also not much of a dancer. That’s being generous—I will usually offer up that I hate dancing, I hate the way I look when I dance, and I especially hate it when other people can see me do it. There are exceptions: weddings and, apparently, Caribou DJ sets.
I had an amazing time dancing for hours with friends right in the front row until I had soaked through my shirt with sweat and my legs were shaking under me. With a big enough crowd and enough people embracing looking silly, the fear of being perceived goes away shockingly fast. The set was recorded, but there’s no full video yet that I can find except what the production company posted on Instagram. You can’t see me in this video (mercifully), but what you can see is a guy behind Caribou’s left shoulder in a Talking Heads shirt who stood almost entirely still with his gob hanging open the. entire. time. I hope that guy enjoyed himself.