Artists like Magdalena Bay who are extremely rhapsodic about their craft must be appreciated. In the current era of rampant commodification and mass production of art, there’s intense pressure to conform to this convention to secure success. Meanwhile, the Magdalena Bay duo of partners Mica Tenebaum and Matthew Lewin sit above this expected conformity. What these artisans concoct is lustrous and glistening explorative music. Their sickly sweet acoustics and hook-heavy melodies, injected with a great dose of optimism, bathe listeners’ ears in soothing tranquillity. Tenenbaum and Lewin know how to make a song sound enormous, but their perceived religious loyalty to boisterous pop is a mirage.
 

If you rewind, you’ll discover that the duo’s musical origins were in progressive rock as Tabula Rasa. For some time, it seemed as if it didn’t get them anywhere: “It was like, ‘No one’s listening to our prog music, what a shame,’” Tenebaum says with a laugh. However, once they tinkered with the complexities and elements of pop music, success came crashing in like an avalanche—their 2021 debut album Mercurial World is a celebration of vibrant synthpop, welcomed with rapturous acclaim. The two admit that “synthpop” is the furthest they’ll dive into genre specifics and that hesitancy derives from avoiding being pigeonholed. Imaginal Disk is a work that transcends its predecessor for this reason—where there are hints of pop convention, Magdalena Bay melds them with their prog roots, creating a sound best described as “alternative”—truly singular, ambiguous and liberating.
 

Massive, bold and exuberant succinctly summarises their music, but that’s only one part of the equation: Magdalena Bay’s extremely stylised aesthetics are intertwined with their idiosyncrasy. Their absurdist, kitschy TikToks are a foil to their immaculately produced songs, but you can’t imagine one without the other. Both are composed in earnest. Their website plays like a cryptic point-and-click adventure game, providing a worldbuilding experience that makes albums like Imaginal Disk—or even artists like Magdalena Bay—feel like an event. What’s more surprising is that their devotion to this imaginative mystique first organically emerged during this record’s production: “As we were finishing the music for [Imaginal Disk], we were having visual ideas, which was never the case before,” Tenenbaum reveals. So, here we have these playful musicians opening the door for direct audience engagement with their inventive world—and in that meticulous process, they’ve seamlessly made their magnum opus.
 

In my pursuit of understanding Imaginal Disk, the press kit packaged an archetypal short-form video of theirs that filled in the record’s overarching narrative. The lyrics follow the character of True, played by Tenebaum through her vocals. In her universe, alien hands have etched the titular “imaginal disk” into humans—an artefact containing one’s consciousness. True is set to receive an upgrade, but following the installation, her body rejects it and she learns what it means to be human. That is, being susceptible to unsuspecting surprises and onerous introspection, whilst experiencing life to the brim. Indeed, the tale is doused in the supernatural, but it’s grounded in reality when you align it with Magdalena Bay’s convergence of prog with pop—a multifaceted sound direction that’s as prismatic as the human condition. Take the single ‘Image’, a coiling, entrancing, synth-heavy barrage with explicit notions of musical dualism: “Meet your brand new image / I’m the best you’ve got / True or not”. This integral idea is also hinted at with the cover art: Tenebaum as pop is ethereally shining, yet juxtaposed by the enigmatic alien hand reaching in as darker, methodical prog music. Magdalena Bay’s curious musical origins in prog finally come to a head with their novel pop experimentation. The lead pop rock single ‘Death & Romance’ affirms this—a distilled culmination of their entire discography. The precisely-placed piano licks and Tenenbaum’s unique voice make a profoundly powerful ballad that you’d never describe as typical pop.
 

With these cuts, the duo are writing fire. They’re unquestionably individual, but it doesn’t hurt to draw some likenesses for broader listening. The swaying ‘Killing Time’ is as infectious as any buoyant Tame Impala breather (think ‘The Moment’ or ‘Lost in Yesterday’). The standout bitpoppy ‘Watching T.V.’ is a pensive indie pop tune concluding with an effervescent catharsis like Porter Robinson’s recent lyric-heavy electropop. Meanwhile, ‘Cry for Me’ and ‘Angel on Satellite’ show signs of marked compositional progression. The former is uptempo neo-psychedelia with ascending chamber strings, whereas the latter opens sombre and unsuspectingly ruptures into piano rock jubilance. Closing Imaginal Disk is the cute and twinkly ‘The Ballad of Matt & Mica’, commemorating the duo’s artistic evolution with lines such as “Two kids in a new town, baby” and “Not ordinary, not ordinary” harking back to them finding their footing in the world’s ever-expanding musical landscape.
 

Ultimately, Imaginal Disk is the most realised Magdalena Bay has ever been. No shopping list of spirited adjectives can adequately describe it—you need to experience their grandiose spacey expedition for yourself. There’s only one direction the two can venture off to on their extraterrestrial journey and it’s upward. The sky’s the limit—Magdalena Bay has finally seized a sound that’ll forever be their own.
 

Imaginal Disk is available to listen to now on all major music platforms.