Into The Music
Magdalena Bay is Mica Tenenbaum and Matt Lewin, a duo from Miami who moved to Los Angeles and built a following through a combination of genuinely great music and an aesthetic that extends from the songs into the visual and conceptual presentation of everything they do. Their breakthrough came with Mercurial World in 2021, a psychedelic synth-pop record that found an audience among listeners who were hungry for pop music that took itself seriously as art without being pretentious about it.
Imaginal Disk in 2024 expanded everything. The production is denser, the conceptual frame is more elaborate, and the songs are better than anything they’d done before. “Killing Time” became their biggest song to date, which is satisfying when you consider how genuinely strange and ambitious the record it appears on is. Commercial success for weird, smart synth-pop isn’t guaranteed, and they’ve earned it.
Their approach to the post-Imaginal Disk period, releasing pairs of singles and gathering them into a vinyl collection, is a way of staying present without forcing an album cycle that would require something as fully developed as Imaginal Disk. It keeps the music coming while the next record develops at whatever pace it needs to develop.
The singles from September 2025 through early 2026 are the work of a band at the height of their creative confidence, trying things and releasing them quickly. That’s a good energy to be in. The Nice Day collection captures it.
