The Californian duo’s synth-pop odyssey about the prismatic human psyche has taken the world by storm.
Bringing together sickly-sweet hooks, boisterous musicianship and vivid worldbuilding, it’s no wonder why Magdalena Bay are one of the world’s most captivating pop groups right now.
Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin put so much of themselves into the adventurous project, drawing upon music they loved as kids and beloved cult films from decades past to shape their dazzling band.
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With their latest record Imaginal Disk, they’ve skyrocketed into stardom. Lauded by critics and pop heads alike, the album’s passionate acclaim came in like an avalanche. Nearly six months since its release, Magdalena Bay are returning down under for live shows, including an unmissable gig at St Kilda’s Palace Foreshore on 7 March.
The rapturous concept album, their most realised yet, still feels like an event – but writing with such ambition wasn’t outside their wheelhouse.
“I don’t think we ever have released something that we felt was unnatural while we were making it, because then I think it won’t feel right for us,” Matthew says. “Imaginal Disk is just a culmination of our musical exposure and experience from our childhood up until now.”
Their earliest musical endeavours were rooted in progressive rock. Their first band, Tabula Rasa, had a tiny audience of “just [their] parents in the audience,” Matthew tells me laughing.
Genre-wise, on Imaginal Disk they naturally stuck to their prog roots. “We were in an era of going back to music we really, really loved in high school,” Mica says. “A lot of that is older music, like progressive rock that inspired our first band we had together, where I was really digging into Paul McCartney and Joni Mitchell for the first time.”
On their debut album, Mercurial World, they largely played with electropop. This time, rock instruments are at the fore. The sprawling, 15-track record sounds enormous – massive drum kicks and jubilant piano keys decorate the vibrant synths bolstering Mica’s soaring voice. Their precise knack for prog and pop has coalesced into a truly distinctive sound.
“When we were working on it, we were programming drums, but it didn’t feel complete until we recorded the live drums,” Matthew says. “Some songs require different things, and it’s not like we set out to make a record with more live instrumentation – the songs we were making all happened to call for those things.”
Take the song Image, a bouncy, glittery synth barrage about changing as a person – a universal theme presented in extraterrestrial glamour. Death & Romance follows in the tracklist, offering an exuberant, powerful pop-rock ballad about star-crossed lovers whose strong feelings for each other bring them closer yet strain their relationship.
Death & Romance is easily Imaginal Disk’s fullest cut, so it was surprising to discover it was the first written for the album. “It felt different. It called for more acoustic instrumentation that we hadn’t been doing a ton,” Mica reveals. “In a way, it set the tone for what came next.”
With the lustrous pop music sorted, this lent itself to constructing a cohesive visual identity, something they committed to quite early in the process.
The duo’s love for ‘70s–‘80s cinema played a huge role in Imaginal Disk’s extremely stylised aesthetics. The combination of colouring, film technique and cinematography was crucial, but most important was the feeling those films emanate.
“We’ve always been into sci-fi,” says Matthew. “We love a sci-fi story. We watched Flash Gordon pretty late in the writing process, but that was a big influence with the colours and the tone.”
Imaginal Disk’s visuals and music are inseparable from its overarching fictional world. The album follows the character of True Blue, played by Mica. In the album’s universe, she’s abducted by aliens who insert the titular “imaginal disk” in her forehead – a CD containing human consciousness. True Blue rejects it and learns what it means to be human.
The integral idea is even integrated into their website, playing like a cryptic point-and-click adventure game. Its map contains lo-fi-styled visuals Matthew says they “love to lean into” and lyrical references and motifs scattered across its surreal locations. At its core, Imaginal Disk is a concept album that feels monumentous.
But Matthew admits it’s easier to make music “sound really big and expensive with just a laptop” than to “fake” big-budget videos. So, Magdalena Bay took advantage of the limitations. Mica shares they used fast cuts and edited the videos themselves, resulting in a unique visual style that’s entirely their own.
“It’s like, ‘How do we make something feel unique and special without a crazy set piece or a billion dollars of special effects and stuff?’. I think those limitations have always been a benefit to us in that way,” Matthew says.
With Imaginal Disk unveiled to the world, bigger and more diverse audiences are on board to witness it on their extravagant Imaginal Mystery Tour.
“We made these songs a while ago, which is crazy, even though it just came out a little while ago,” Mica says. “But I think it’s cool. I’m down to keep living in it. I feel like it’s not done yet. There’s much more to be done, you know? I need some time to live its life.”
The two welcome the surge of popularity, yet find the intensity has certainly differed from past shows. “When we play bigger shows, I think there are more people, but the number of crazy fans gets diluted a bit by more casual fans, which is a natural extension of growing your audience,” Matthew admits.
“The show we’re doing now is a little bit less dancey,” he continues. “It’s more of a theatrical performance.”
Mica also chips in: “We’ll see more people just watching. I’ve grown to like that. At first, I was like, ‘Okay, they’re maybe jumping less,’ but it makes sense.”
Above all else, what can’t be understated is the incredible way Imaginal Disk explores self-examination and the human condition, even if it’s drenched in the supernatural. That’s where its depth comes from.
“I think there’s a really cool spot in-between something that’s personal and abstract, maybe those aren’t even really at the end of a spectrum, almost not at odds with each other,” Mica shares. “What we feel is abstracted in a way, so it’s fun and it’s not hard to add mystery to these human experiences that we have.”
Matthew agrees: “It’s probably a more effective way to describe the intangible human emotions. How else are you going to do it? It has to be expressed in some sort of abstract form, right? Because it is abstract: your feelings.”
You can get tickets to see Magdalena Bay play live in Melbourne at the Palace Foreshore on March 7 here.
