Magdalena Bay want to defy your expectations

While I’m not sure how to properly delineate normalcy from weirdness (or synonymize weirdness with intelligence), if you ever take the time to chase “Ooh Mamma” with a sit-down interview with Tim Heidecker, the sinister truth that he’s pretty grounded when he chooses to be and perfectly capable of holding a “normal” conversation will let slip. Now this should be common sense: if characters are their performers, they are only part of their performers. And yet when I sit down to talk to Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin of Magdalena Bay, our conversation stands out to me as perhaps the most “normal” I’ve had with any musicians in the past 12 months. This, ironically, perhaps makes it the weirdest.

Having familiarity with Tabula Rasa helped me anticipate a certain level of disconnect. While Tenenbaum and Lewin began recording as Magdalena Bay in 2016, the origins of their partnership began in 2011, back when they were a couple of prog-loving teens from Miami. “When we were both in high school — I was 16, Mica was 15 — we met at this after school music program called LIVE! Modern School of Music, where they would take kids and put them in a band and have them play cover songs together,” Lewin tells me. “We got along with a few other kids in that band and we started meeting up after: not only at the program, but rehearsing and writing our own music.”

Together with bassist Mariano Sarrate and drummer Nick Villamizar, they recorded their first EP in LIVE!’s studio. Two full-lengths followed — their self-titled 2013 album and 2016’s Crimson — before the band called it quits. “We went to college and that whole band sort of got spread out across the country, so we stopped. But [Mica and I] wanted to continue to make music together, because we felt like we had a good musical partnership from that band, and we came up with Magdalena Bay.” Six months after Crimson, the duo uploaded their first song under the name: a groovy, upbeat reimagining of Tears for Fears’ “Head Over Heels.”

Revisiting or visiting this cover for the first time in 2024 is, again, weird because of how “normal” it is. While Tenenbaum and Lewin had begun the stylistic shift towards pop music, Tenenbaum’s vocals lean closer to the sturdy, naturalistic tone of Tabula Rasa than the airy aughts pop diva affectation employed on Mag Bay’s most notable songs, such as “Killshot” and “Secrets (Your Fire).” There’s an inordinately trackable journey of growth to follow within the early 2016-2017 Magdalena Bay singles, because they started recording and releasing music in this mode almost immediately after deciding they had an interest in it, even as fans.

“Back in 2016, we were listening to pop for the first time, trying to craft a pop song,” Tenenbaum admits. “A lot of our earlier pop songs, there's not a lot of depth there. It's just trying to fit into the language of of pop radio.” Incidentally, some of these early cuts happen to really hold up: “Set Me Off” might be a half-step removed from the identity they truly began to zero in on in 2018, but it’s still a remarkably constructed liquid DnB tune that hinted at a virtuosic knack for the craft.

By the time they really hit their stride, Magdalena Bay had done a 180° from 20-minute winding prog rock epics: their first “mini mix” featured six songs in 12 minutes, stitched together through transitions rather than any sort of unifying concept or theme. It’s the one with “Killshot” on it, probably still the duo’s “biggest” song after it went semi-viral with all manner of fan edits and a “slowed + reverb” version that has slightly more YouTube views than the original. Even if you’ve never heard of Mag Bay before, there’s a solid chance you’ve been hooked unawares by its simple yet immediately gripping bass synth progression as Taco Bell tries to sexy up the hocking of their Americanised Mexican fast food. It’s only weird when you actually think about it.

We’re stuck on weirdness because Mag Bay is stuck on weirdness because the world is stuck on weirdness. When I ask why the shift to pop after Tabula Rasa — why not recruit some new members and start a new prog rock band or move forward as a prog duo? — Tenenbaum responds with a refreshingly honest but deceptively odd answer. “I don’t know. We were doing the prog rock thing and it felt like strange people weren’t really connecting to that,” she says. “Beyond that, we were just really curious about pop. It was kind of like this creature that we didn't know or understand, and it seemed very easy to us as outsiders. And we're like, ‘okay, if we're making, you know, 20-minute progressive rock songs, we could definitely make pop songs.’ And then, you know, maybe be more successful.”

Pivoting towards pop in hopes of greater commercial success is nothing if not sensible, though many artists who lane-switch might hold their true reason closer to the chest. But what sticks out to me is that Tenenbaum specifically notes a desire to connect with “strange” people. When you start to pick at the reasoning, more questions arise? Is pop music “stranger” than prog? If the goal is increased commercial success, is aiming for a stranger fanbase the play? Unless, of course, there are more “strange” people than “normal” people, or at least the quantitative passion of strange people exceeds that of normal people. I don’t think the statement has much intention behind it, and yet I quietly spiral down a little philosophical rabbit hole.

“As soon as we started trying to make a pop song, it’s very difficult,” she continued. “I don’t know if restraint is the right word, but there is definitely an exact craft to it. And I think now, as we’ve continued to make music, we’re closer to finding a way to mesh all that we learned about crafting a pop song with whatever it is about non-pop music that we like. Whether it’s atmosphere or experimentation or just weird song structure.”

Imaginal Disk, the duo’s new album, is the fruit of that desire to marry accessibility with eclecticism. It is patently the most “out there” thing Tenenbaum and Lewin have recorded together, precisely because it is neither normal nor strange, but instead a heated wrestling match between pop convention and the more fanciful tangents and progressions that threaten to twist pop’s form up like a pretzel. There’s no “Killshot”: there’s really not even a “Secrets (Your Fire)” or “Hysterical Us.” Which is to say that the simple immediacy that some fans might be expecting from Mag Bay has been traded for songs readily shift and sprawl out from their origin points, placing a greater emphasis on soundscapes, new vocal techniques, and oddly layered rhythms. In a sense, it’s Tenenbaum and Lewin re-engaging with their musical roots and working out what place they have in their music going forward.

Mag Bay swung hard with the album’s first music video back in June: an eight-minute off-kilter sci-fi odyssey for “Death & Romance” and what would later be revealed as its unofficial outro, “Fear, Sex.” Tenenbaum plays a character named True, who spends most of the video gyrating in a spatially displaced aquamarine bedroom or in the foreground of some uncanny bucolic scenery. Lewin is a being of pure light: the two kiss, and Tenenbaum gets some of the light stuck in her mouth. All the while, they’re being monitored by aliens or gimps or alien gimps, and they attempt to kidnap this being of pure light before he escapes in his UFO, leaving True behind. Then she gets “updated” with what is presumed to be the titular Imaginal Disk.

That the video is bizarre isn’t surprising: Magdalena Bay has established a bent towards the absurd early on through their TikTok clips and full mini mix videos. Rather, it’s the style and grandiosity of the song itself which is striking. “Death & Romance” is effectively the best baggy revival tune since George Clanton’s “I Been Young,” though if that song is for swaying lighters at the club, “Death & Romance” is a big, bombastic epic that launches itself into the cosmos. Synths crop up, but the core instrumental hook is built around these punchy piano chords and the choppy drums that shuffle underneath. It’s catchy in the way that pop often is, but it’s also a bit disorienting. Mag Bay has a habit of nestling little references into their lyrics and melodies (see the pseudo-interpolation of Madonna’s “Material Girl” on their first album’s title track, “Mercurial World”). Here, the “wires in your head” line calls back to Pink Floyd’s “If.”

“The bands that we were really into in high school were Radiohead, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, early ‘70s Genesis. And I think while we were making this record, we at some point did a full Pink Floyd discography, and listened to a full Beatles discography,” says Lewin. “You have these long drives, and you're trying to listen to new music, and obviously you run out, or you get just irritated, and you want to revisit certain things,” Tenenbaum adds. “Just like driving through the desert in the middle of the night listening to Pink Floyd was probably inspiring us in some way.”

While Radiohead, Pink Floyd, and The Beatles are effectively the poster children for “weird” music being synthesized into forms that connected to mainstream audiences, Peter Gabriel stands out as a slightly more specific reference point. You might catch it in the music video for “Image” about a minute in a half in: Tenenbaum’s sky blue makeup blends in with her background much like Gabriel’s did for a moment a little more than a minute into the “Sledgehammer” video, while clippings of assorted pincer-like utensils — scissors, pliers, forceps, etc. — animate around her.

Lewin more directly compares “Image” to another of Gabriel’s videos. “You have to check it out if you haven’t seen the video for ‘Steam.’ ‘Sledgehammer’ is super claymation, very analog. ‘Steam’ is like, Peter Gabriel fucking around with early ‘90s CGI.”

Tenenbuam chimes in with, “‘Steam’ is like, so weird, yeah?”

And while Imaginal Disk’s mysterious and alien aesthetic and sense of atmosphere might be more closely aligned with Roger Waters-era Pink Floyd, it’s Gabriel’s writing with Genesis that seems to most closely inform the writing on the album’s proggier cuts, such as “Tunnel Vision.” Gabriel’s had a gift for imbuing his dense compositions with a sense of lightness and levity, and Mag Bay does the same here with its delicate but tightly layered and constantly evolving synth lines. By the time the track reaches its back half, however, it melts down into this swathe of heavy droning, frantic drum fills, and squelching electronics. I remember lines from “Image” that get me hunting down timestamps: the first chorus makes a reference to “22 more minutes.” A minute later, the next chorus kicks in “21 more minutes.” This feels like the initiation of a countdown. So I go to check what comes 22 minutes after that first chorus and “Image.” It’s that back-half breakdown in “Tunnel Vision” which leads into the album’s next act. It’s the reboot, the “brand new image.”

Tenenbaum and Lewin don’t deny Imaginal Disk’s conceptual nature, but they do sort of undersell it. “The way it makes sense in my mind is these layers of meaning… the album within itself is just an exploration of self and consciousness, and is quite personal in some ways,” says Tenenbaum. “But of course, we love to sprinkle in the sci-fi within the lyrics and narrative and storytelling.”

Regarding the narrative of the album versus the story being told through the videos, Lewin adds: “It’s like another interpretation of it. It's not like we’re not doing like Tommy or something where the album is the story and very intrinsically one in the same. And you could listen to the album like you’re watching the movie. I think for us, the idea is the album exists on its own, as its own piece of art, and then the videos that we’re making are one interpretation of that.”

But Mag Bay really hammer home how much they value albums as opposed to singles as we talk. I’ve often heard Mag Bay compared to Kylie Minogue and I’ve drawn the comparison myself, particularly with regards to the default vocal tone and phrase elongation Tenenbaum starts to employ a couple years in. I was surprised when Tenenbuam picked up Step Back in Time: The Definitive Collection for a What’s In My Bag? and she mentioned not knowing most of the songs. And the reason seems to just boil down to a belief that she’s more of a singles artist.

“When we started listening to contemporary pop music, that was really our first in-depth exposure to that,” says Lewin. “We listened to Kylie Minogue, but I think we maybe listened to one album in full, which was Fever, right?” Tenenbaum confirms.

“I feel like some artists are, like, really album oriented, where you can go through their discography and listen to album by album, and some are just not,” Lewin continues. “And I think it’s harder for us to really get into an artist that’s not necessarily like that. It could also just be that shortly after that, our taste started shifting.”

Tenenbaum concedes that she is inspired by vocalists that are more naturally aligned with her range. “But I think on this record, I was trying to expand that a bit, and I was listening a lot to Paul McCartney and David Bowie. And of course, I’m never gonna sound like them. But I’m trying to pick up on what I can, whether that’s the tiniest things, like enunciation, or a certain earnestness or more bravado on others. I try to think less about gender and style constraints, and just more about a character, depending on what a song is saying.”

Characters — multiple — are at the center Imaginal Disk, despite Tenenbaum boiling the record down to an exploration of self. “I think “Angel On a Satellite” feels very like me.” I hang on that a bit, mainly the uncertainty of it. “Maybe to me, at least. Someone else might listen to it, and I just think it sounds like me, but in my head — where I have a huge microscope on every sound that comes out of my mouth, it sounds a little different to me than what I’ve sung before. Like, more raw, more natural, a little lower in my register. Maybe more Fiona Apple-inspired. I don’t sound anything like her, but I’m trying to channel that more natural delivery.” I find myself stuck on the idea of channeling naturalism. “And then in “Cry for Me,” she continues, “where I’m singing in a different way at the end — more dramatic and shouting — that’s another type of character there. I mean, like, literal character, but also character to the voice.”

The best I can piece together is that Imaginal Disk involves multiple personified facets or aspects of Tenenbaum’s perceived self. We could go as far as to call Imaginal Disk “Jungian.” While there’s no specific admittance that True from the videos is one of the characters of the album itself — at least in a literal sense — the symbology of the name itself can’t really be ignored. If I were to theorycraft, Imaginal Disk seems to be a metaphor for working through a personality crisis. Are Mag Bay up-and-coming pop stars or are they still the Genesis heads from a decade and a half ago? Tenenbaum’s shifted her vocal style so much since then that she has to “channel” her natural register. And there’s a sort of duality between horror and wonder between realising you can be whoever you want to be, but you might lose sight of “True” along the way.

But again, Imaginal Disk seems to be about rectifying that. Some fans have playfully referred to the disk insertion in the “Death & Romance” video as a lobotomy. But Occam’s razor dictates I look at it as software: an appropriate Internet-age representation of how our minds develop over time. We patch out bugs and create new ones, add new features, etc. Some features are worth reimplementing.

Imaginal Disk in many ways reminds me of two specific albums: glass beach’s Plastic Death and MGMT’s Congratulations. Both challenging follow-ups to breakout indie albums. Mercury Rev’s Dave Fridmann worked as a mixing engineer on both Congratulations and Imaginal Disk, but beyond the sound mixing, both stand as relatively staunch contrasts to their poppier immediate predecessors. I ask if they’re concerned at all about how the album will be received. Lewin laughs.

“Ironically, we’re in this privileged position where we didn’t have like, three number one worldwide hits,” he fairly points out. “They had this expectation that they were gonna keep breaking chart numbers and having massive smash hits. Luckily and unluckily, we don’t have that expectation on us. So I don’t know if people are going to listen to Imaginal Disk and be like, ‘oh man, I don’t know if there’s a ‘Time to Pretend’ on this.’ 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.”

When I talked to glass beach about the former earlier this year, they — similarly to Mag Bay — mentioned their appreciation for how Radiohead and The Beatles bridged the gap between pop and experimentation in ways that most don’t attempt. What goes into tying Radiohead to something like, say, Britney Spears? Lewin has a very specific answer. “Listen to the song ‘Heaven on Earth’ by Britney Spears. Listen to the chord progressions in that song. They sound like ‘My Iron Lung.’” And similarly, Plastic Death and Imaginal Disk are personal yet obscurely written mind-dive records. Imaginal Disk is a little easier to grip onto (we don’t dig into The Red Book), but the “truth” is intentionally obfuscated in both.

When we talk about their skits, their presentation, their lore, I bring up AG Cook and Poppy. Lewin fires back: “Definitely Tim & Eric.” And in retrospect, this makes perfect sense, in the way that Magdalena Bay seem insistent upon downplaying the “meaning” within what they do. Maybe you won’t find anything as silly as “Petite Feet” or “Shrimp and White Wine” on the album, but the duo pair genuine introspection with a sort of cheekiness that directs you away from the headiness of the subject. I bring up Hypnospace Outlaw as an example of a video game that does this especially well and they mention they’ve played it, along with Hylics and Tux & Fanny. I recommend they check out Jazzpunk.

All this to say that there is value in the intentional pursuit of “weird.” The “normal” and “weird” rarely dare to tread upon each other’s realms, or at least this is what we often tell ourselves. Maybe David Lynch is “real” weird because his weirdness is always on, or it’s a specific brand of weirdness. Maybe “Ooh Mamma” is a “normal” person’s approximation of weirdness because there’s no meaning behind it. Or maybe the meaning is something we just don’t see. Or maybe overthinking all of your personas — the normal ones, the weird ones, and everything in-between — is, in fact, pretty fucking weird. In any case, I’m grateful for Imaginal Disk and I’m glad Magdalena Bay decided it was worth pandering to strange people like myself.