It starts like this: a flicker of synth, then a bloom of red and pink light. Mica Tenenbaum—one half of synth–pop duo Magdalena Bay—stands alone on a centerstage pedestal, framed by a halo of light and an enormous sunflower headpiece. Or maybe it starts earlier, in a dorm room—Tenenbaum at Penn, Matthew Lewin at Northeastern University—two ex–prog–rock teens trying to rewire their musical instincts into something shinier, more playful.
The two met in high school, where they first flexed their creative muscles in a classic rock cover band. Eventually, they began writing and performing original music under the name Tabula Rasa—a project that included current Mag Bay touring drummer Nick Villa; (their 20–minute epics are still online, and yes, they’re absolutely worth a listen).
Two studio albums, three EPs, and three mixtapes later, the duo has closed the distance—just feet apart onstage at Franklin Music Hall, living by the offbeat visual style birthed by long–distance file sharing, reliant on free VHS footage from the Internet Archive and homemade green screen effects. In a way, that aesthetic hasn’t left; the setting behind them is surreal but distinct—a floral armchair, a “Creation of Adam”–inspired backdrop. Some kind of winged portal–screen onstage blinks and flickers, bearing a sequence of uncanny images from corporate clip art to pictures of brains.
In reply, the audience is a sea of acrylic hoop earrings and leather jackets; ripped jeans and septum piercings. It’s a sold–out show, and the evidence—besides the line that had curled around the block—is a charged stillness: the sheer density of attention as the lights rise, signaling the duo’s arrival. Tenenbaum steps out in royal blue parachute pants and a matching top, mirrored by Lewin in red, stationed quietly at the side of the stage behind his keyboard. He keeps mostly to himself. Tenenbaum does not. She glides from one side of the stage to the other—vocalist and ringleader—her movement loose and unchoreographed, commanding the crowd with a pointed fist. As they launch into “She Looked Like Me!,” the opening track on their most recent album, Imaginal Disk, the audience doesn’t skip a beat. The response is immediate and full–bodied—less a cheer than a rolling current of sound, the room responding in a single, reflexive exhale. From the barricade to the dim outskirts of the crowd, where bodies linger in loose clusters between merch counters, everyone mouths along, arms half–raised.
The duo moves briskly through the opening suite of the record—“Killing Time,” “True Blue Interlude,” “Image”—maintaining just enough narrative continuity to preserve the album’s strange little arc, but still leaving room for the crowd to react. The songs are rendered with more grit, a little more twinkle, and less polish than their studio counterparts, like the internet version of something that had suddenly become embodied in the darkness. “Killing Time” opens with a smooth, low–end bassline that immediately distinguishes it from the previous track, twinkling at the edges before unraveling into a noodly guitar solo and a chant–heavy outro that evokes Congratulations–era MGMT. “True Blue Interlude,” is a brief but uncanny detour—less a song than a (presumably post–disk insertion) infomercial. The transition to “Image” is seamless, driven by a knowingly theatrical sci–fi lead, punctuated with metallic cowbell and stray percussive jabs. The band detours briefly into Mercurial World territory with “Secrets (Your Fire)” and “You Lose!”— the energy doesn’t spike so much as deepen; the trio of showgoers in front of me reacts excitedly to the circuit, in an oddly touching way, and it’s clear I am amongst true devotees.
The duo’s return to collaboration didn’t come out of nowhere, instead succeeding a steady string of releases: Chairlift’s Moth, Charli xcx’s Vroom Vroom, and Grimes’ Art Angels. The left–of–anything inspiration offered a kind of creative permission. If the old prog–rock instincts had become too self–serious, here was pop that bent without losing its bite. This reentry point—the pop song as something to play with, to overproduce at will—still defines Magdalena Bay’s instincts. Their relentless and intentional sway to the internet avant–garde is obvious, even from a glance at their website. Their older archive of media is replete with 60–second sonic detours dubbed mini mixes, whose visuals resemble the kind of neon–drenched, faux–mystical detritus pulled from the subconscious of the early internet. It’s only fitting that their first major bout of virality arose when a slowed and reverb version of “Killshot”—a song from their EP A Little Rhythm and a Wicked Feeling—began soundtracking TikTok anime edits.
But to call Magdalena Bay a band feels incomplete. Their digital footprint suggests something closer to an experimental media loop with a soundtrack, having built a sprawling online presence of parody TikToks and self–produced skits while borrowing freely from vaporwave aesthetics and mid–2000s ephemera. With Magdalena Bay, the line between sincerity and satire blurs, and the culminating appeal is an impressive lack of self–seriousness. It works, especially for a younger, terminally online audience bathed in visual excess and fluent in platform–native semiotics.
Mercurial World, their 2021 debut studio album, upgrades production without sacrificing any of the absurdity; if anything, the confidence of the record feels like a proof of concept. What followed was Imaginal Disk—which doesn’t so much expand their world as stretch it into something harder to hold onto.
By the middle of the night, Tenenbaum reappears, clad in crimson as she cycles through a rotating cast of costumes. Her look isn’t anchored by accessories so much as animated by a series of visual motifs; each costume seems designed to signal transformation, and to inhabit whatever register each song demands—a sheer cape with a flaming trim for the vapor–wave adjacent “Cry for Me” or a bug–eyed alien mask for the final stretch of “Tunnel Vision.” Her getup is equally strange and just as intentional as the setup behind her: screens flicker with curated chaos stage left, displaying a collage of looping animations and half–rendered digital relics that feel one click removed from vaporwave corporate kitsch. They invite, although never demand, attention from the audience. Regardless of whether you choose to follow the visuals, the performance holds—too fully inhabited to be ironic.
Tenenbaum’s presence is elastic: sometimes exaggerated, sometimes oddly grounded, but always directed outward. Now wielding an electric guitar, Lewin leaves his post at the periphery to join her at center stage, where she grips a massive keytar. Her movement is almost angular for the supercharged crescendo that is “Tunnel Vision,” pushed forward by an increasingly frenzied cascade of percussion. “Love Is Everywhere,” follows, delivered with the full–body mischief of a track that knows it’s one glitter spill away from a cartoon—a performance as memorable almost as much as it is frolic inducing.
Their second record’s loose conceptual premise involves a character named True who, when due for a cosmic upgrade, has an extraterrestrial LaserDisc inserted into her forehead. The image—absurd and strangely moving—frames the album’s central transformation. Her body rejects the software, and what follows is not so much a recovery arc as a hazy loop of reconfiguration. She must relearn “what it means to be human”—without one clear answer.
If Mercurial World played with the looping of time, Imaginal Disk seems to prod at the boundaries of personhood. Its narrator—or narrators—are porous, flickering between sincerity and roleplay, always slightly at odds with their own projections. Some tracks slip in and out of cohesion, others open with clean hooks or unravel mid–thought. The titular “disk” in question could be a metaphor, metaphor exhausted, metaphor made literal, or just a framing device for a longer “glitch” in identity formation (although some fans joke it’s a lobotomy).
Amid its recurring, proverbial themes of consciousness, what holds the album together is less a plot than some ambient sense of searching; the record’s emotional stakes feel buried inside the production and at large, less let on by lyrics. You could argue the disorientation is deliberate. It makes sense—the band’s ethos could be summed up as haphazard, elastic, unconcerned with resolution. And while the emotional logic is intuitive, the result is steeped in obscurity—not every song lands cleanly on its own. On the whole, there’s beauty in the way the album refuses to clarify itself. In the haze, I get a grounded feeling that coherence was never the point; the costume changes and theatrics are less a stable referent than some scaffold for affective immersion. There is narrative continuity embedded in the performance, to be sure, but much like the record itself—which is stronger in emotional accumulation than in any discrete storyline—the performance seems to trust that the effect will land even if the plot escapes you.
By the end of the night, what lingers is an apparent truth: This is a show worth seeing. The duo’s commitment to reinterpreting pop music from inside the media machine is grounded and works immeasurably well onstage. That they can unite such fragmented material without sacrificing absurdity is a testament to the specificity of their vision. It’s this easy fluency that’s so compelling. If pop is drifting toward digital maximalism, Magdalena Bay have already staked their ground; their show proves it’s territory worth exploring.
