The second that Mica Tenenbaum finished listening to the sequenced version of Imaginal Disk, the second full-length album from her electro-pop duo Magdalena Bay, she had to mark the occasion. She knew that weeks of mixing, mastering, and marketing lay ahead—but at that moment, before the fine-tuning and video shoots and planned rollout, she and partner Matt Lewin were content with what they made.
“This is as happy as we’re ever going to get listening to this music,” recalls Mica. “I took a voice memo, and I was like, ‘This is us, and we’re happy right now.’”
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“When you finish the writing and the production, you listen to it altogether,” chimes Matt. “I feel like the most pure it is for you because then, as you start really diving into the details and fixing the mixes, you lose—”
“—that perspective and the magic,” says Mica, finishing Matt’s thought. A testament to their chemistry, they frequently take over each other’s sentences during their interview.
For a band who grew their audience through remarkably sturdy pop songs and delightfully oddball humor, they know that preserving that mystery and sense of discovery is what makes Magdalena Bay special. That voice note was the reminder that no matter how long and grueling the album release process is, they’re doing it out of a genuine love of their craft.
Thankfully, tons of other people love Magdalena Bay too. While their 2019 song “Killshot” went viral after being paired with a sexy anime fancam, their 2021 debut full-length, Mercurial World, endeared them to a whole different class of music literati. Inspired by colorful digital divas like Grimes and numerous Legend of Zelda video game soundtracks, the Mag Bay sound quickly gave way to pitch-perfect pop confections, and the immaculately produced Mercurial World never forgot its sense of fun or purpose.
As they toured our actual mercurial world in support, new opportunities arose: Their song “The Beginning” got synced with Netflix’s Wednesday; their “Mag Monday” streams showed how they produced the entirety of their album in music-nerd detail; they released the third iteration of their beloved Mini Mix EP series, got signed to large indie Mom + Pop Records, and got production and writing credits for songs that ended up on wildly different albums, ranging from K-pop soloist Jihyo’s 2023 Zone EP to Lil Yachy’s landmark 2023 psych-rock LP Let’s Start Here.
Yet when Florida natives Matt & Mica meet SPIN at Los Angeles’ legendary Vintage Synthesizer Museum, they admit it’ll likely be a long time before they place songs like that again. “A few years ago, we thought when we moved to L.A. that’s what we wanted to do. We wanted to be in the writing rooms,” notes Mica. “I don’t know if it’s for us; I think we just love our artist project. We grew to really love that and all the facets of that. I found that to be more of a creative outlet that makes sense for us. Our sessions are few and far between for that kind of writing.”
Yet their funky spaced-out Yachty contribution, “Running Out of Time,” is borrowed back and repurposed as the lush “Love is Everywhere” off of Imaginal Disk, a record that effectively moves the Mag Bay sound into the realm of “prog-pop” (which makes sense, given in high school they played in a progressive rock outfit called Tabula Rasa). The pounding piano melodrama of “Death & Romance,” the record’s lead single, enthusiastically told fans that while their songcraft remains instantly recognizable, they were branching out into longer, melodramatic tracks that eschewed more traditional song structures.
Despite titles like “Fear, Sex” and “Death & Romance,” they don’t view the new album as particularly romantic, as the more straightforward love songs rested with Mercurial World.
“I’d say this one is less romantic,” notes Mica, when asked. Matt’s perspective is different: “I think it’s more romantic in the historical sense of the word, where it’s like the Romantic era of music. It’s more melodrama; it’s more dark. I think it evokes those Romantic aesthetics.”
While the enthusiastic second single “Image” showed the group still could make spacey bangers if they wanted to, its lines of rebirth and meeting “your brand new image” speaks to the record’s ongoing lyrical threads of self-identity and reflection. References to mirrors and concepts of an undefinable thing living inside of you come up a lot on the album (“I’m looking in the mirror and swallowing the key / It only takes a minute to forget a week” goes the manic chorus at the end of the Steely Dan-indebted “Killing Time”), but Mica notes these themes of characterizing your existence have been on her mind a lot recently.
“I think the whole record is driven by, I dunno, this exploration of self, of really wanting to understand what is inside me,” reflects Mica. “What is it? Can I know it? Can I understand it? And all the questions that come from that question. It leads to endless questions and then more questions, and then that kind of inspires the lyrics, I guess.”
Matt chimes in: “I think the mirror thing specifically comes from Solaris, right?”
“Yeah, definitely,” says Mica, referring to the 1972 Andrei Tarkovsky film, not the 2002 George Clooney one.
“I watched the original movie and, I don’t know, it was cool in a way, but it was very slow. I really love that book, and I don’t know if the movie captured that. I read right before watching it, so I was like, ‘No, no! More shots of the planet!’
“I felt very obsessed with all of these questions and ideas from my books and philosophies and things that now I feel like it’s been exercised in a way for me. After finishing that album, it’s like, ‘Okay, this chapter is done for now,’” she continues. “I think it would be weird if we had to go in and dissect every line. It fucks up the magic and the mystery of it, and that could be weird, but I think it’s fun to talk about the holistic and how we got into it.”
(Credit: Lissyelle Laricchia)
Having moved out of the tiny L.A. apartment that served as the backdrop for their many incredible quarantine-era TikTok videos and into a new property with no neighbors, the duo could expand their sound in beautiful ways: more live drums that weren’t just tracked at a studio, and Mica being able to stretch her voice into incredible new shapes. The lilting piano number “Angel on a Satellite” shows how she uses her instrument to create everything from quiet whispers and full choral opulence.
“I feel like it’s been kind of an interesting journey vocally with everything else that we’ve been doing and figuring out musically when we started making pop. It was like we went from progressive rock and then we do pop, and just how we changed our, I don’t know, our songwriting kind of started to reflect pop,” reflects Mica. “I feel like my voice did too, and now I’m finding I feel more comfortable in my voice; I guess after performing live too, just doing it every day.”
Matt has been able to help bolster her pipes with his Logic-driven arrangements, but for Imaginal Disk, being signed to a larger label means having access to more resources. On Mercurial World, he used clever synth filters to create ornate string section sounds. On the new album, they got to use a full orchestra.
“The last album was chopping off samples and stuff, so not actually recording strings, but this album we were with an arranger called Oliver Hill. And then we recorded them in the studio in Sweden, totally virtually. They were able to get a 20-piece string section together and they had a video and audio feed and we could just give notes live. It’s really cool.”
Walking through the Vintage Synth Museum, their musical chemistry was nothing short of instant. Matt would walk up to the Roland Jupiter 8 and, within seconds, have found the arpeggiator and start making some chords on the fly. Mica would find a nearby Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 and find marimba-like tones that instantly complement Matt’s groove. At one point, he drops the progression for Imaginal‘s closing track “The Ballad of Matt and Mica” off the cuff, as if gearing up to perform it live. One wonders if they’ll be able to top the beautiful strangeness of their last tour, where fans called in to anonymously leave their secrets (on an answering machine) that were then played during their set.
A few of the synths they play with during our discussion can do the classic “orchestra hit” synth sound, which is fitting given that the bouncy “Tunnel Vision,” which served as Imaginal Disk‘s third single, has its own sporadic orchestra hit section plopped right in the middle of the track. Mica already recorded a TikTok dance to go with it. The song displays a very controlled sense of chaos, and the reception of all the singles aligns closely with Matt’s predictions.
“I think what we were expecting is that there is definitely more of a mixed reception where I think maybe some of our previous fans who were maybe really into songs like ‘Killshot’ or ‘Top Dog’ or something might not be so immediately [into it].”
“Which totally makes sense,” jumps in Mica, who also notes she wants the record appreciated as a cohesive work. “I just want the album to come out and I feel uncomfortable with the singles this time, for some reason. It just feels like it’s not right, and it makes sense of course to put singles out, and it’s not like a regret situation or anything like that, but just artistically, I feel uncomfortable. I want people to just hear the album, you know what I mean? Altogether, and that’s how really everything fits in my mind and how it was made.”
The group is cognizant of how they’re perceived and have used YouTube critic reviews as a comedic bit in their social media skits. Yet negative press never really got them down; in fact, it made them feel like they’ve truly made it.
“I generally find negative comments to be a positive thing,” starts Matt, “because I think you don’t want to be doing something that no one has strong feelings about. You’re not going to make everyone happy. You’ll never make something that everyone likes in the world. But you could make something that’s so inoffensive that no one will care either way. I think the worst-case scenario, so I think it’s good when you have people who have really strong positive feelings and also negative feelings.
“We’re also at a point in our careers where we started getting negative comments and we were so excited,” chimes Mica. “No one’s ever going to say something mean about a band that’s so small.”
Matt continues: “It means you sort of trust a threshold and where people will feel comfortable to talk shit about you because they sort of perceive you as—”
“Legitimate,” notes Mica.
“Yeah, because it’s like they’re not just punching down on some random [band], so it is this sort of signifier of, oh, you exist in people’s heads as this level of an artist that I think is obviously great.”
Once fans start spinning this Imaginal Disk, they’ll note that the group’s lyrical world has expanded, circling on certain themes but never outright declaring its subject, leaving much for interpretation. Some lines have a sense of discovery (“Never really noticed I’m the transcendental type,” stems from the psych-funk workout “That’s My Floor”), and some, Jeff Tweedy-like, just sound good in the mouth (“I leave all my dregs to all my progeny,” Mica croons on “Cry for Me”). Yet one of the group’s favorite lyrical journeys is with the dream-pop bop of “Vampire in the Corner.” Matt is particularly fond of the phrase “Baby on a burner / Am I throwing things off?”, while Mica’s favorite has a gloriously offbeat inspiration:
“I like ‘Let the bees do their buzz.’ I think of Jeff Goldblum. I don’t know why; I just picture him when I say that.”
One’s mind drifts to Jeff Goldblum’s 1986 horror classic The Fly upon hearing that, as at one point, his scientist character is asked if he’s a bodybuilder, and he replies, “Yeah, I build bodies. I take them apart, and put them back together again.” Magdalena Bay has done that with their sound, pushing it into complex new directions while still retaining that sugar-rush immediacy. Once that record comes out, that voice memo Mica took after their first listen won’t hold as much power anymore because everyone will get to share in that same sense of joy and fulfillment that comes with spinning that Imaginal Disk.
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