2024 Year End List - #1
Imaginal Disk - Magdalena Bay
Main Genres: Indietronica, Progressive Pop
A decent sampling of: Synth Pop, Art Pop, Psychedelic Pop, Synth Funk, Alternative Dance, Disco, Chillwave
This really might be my most predictable AOTY so far.
If you were in the right circles this past year, then 2024 was really more the year of Imaginal Disk Autumn than it was about Brat Summer. Doesn't really roll off the tongue quite the same way, but regardless - this was a huge moment for indie nerds.
Magdalena Bay have pretty much been a hipster-beloved act since the duo's inception. Matt Lewin and Mica Tenanbaum are two Miami-based, Jewish-Argentinian-American pop afficianados and former prog rockers with a knack for music that is endlessly fun, slick as all hell, and seemingly effortless. They began putting out singles in the mid-2010s and quickly garnered a loyal online cult following.
Their debut LP Mercurial World was a much anticipated record that delivered on many fronts and established them as formidable underdogs in the world of alternative pop music. It was also my 2021 AOTY, so I guess this year's number one isn't all that shocking.
In fact, with how monumental this year's Mag Bay release felt, you probably woulda thought that the band had been well-established indie darling veterans for the entirety of the last decade at least. Imaginal Disk's drop felt like it might as well have been a new Tame Impala or Beach House record for how the online indie nerds (myself included) gleefully reacted to this. And it isn't hard to see why.
In one word, Imaginal Disk is ambitious. Just a ridiculously ambitious record. An album that seeks to be as much as it can possibly be all at once. The record is built from pure imagination, and sets not the sky as the limit, but rather the edges of the known universe.
The debut Mercurial World was incredibly polished, arrived almost fully formed, as though Matt and Mica had been making pop records for years, but if the debut had any considerable flaws, it would have to be the moments where it played it safe, sounded too much like what you expected it to be (yes, this is me nitpicking the hell out of what is still a brilliant record).
But Imaginal Disk subverts all expectations. While I would still describe it as mainly being an electronic pop record with a lot of prog on it, there's actually so much going on here that it was quite hard to come up with the genre tags that I normally always put on these reviews. It's also an apparent product of meticulous perfectionism - Mica describes in one interview about going through dozens and dozens of vocal takes just to recreate the way she sounded on one of the demos for "Killing Time".
True to the band's prog roots, the record has a "loose" concept wherein it explores, and in some ways, cheekily parodies ideas surrounding trans-humanism. The story involves exactly what you get on the admittedly garish cover art - a protagonist who is made to undergo a sort of trans-humanist experiment by higher beings via a disk insertion. It makes a lot of sense with context; Mica and Matt are very much denizens of the internet, and clearly fascinated and enamored with the uncanny aesthetics of false utopian futurism that are present in internet movements like the vaporwave genre. Mag Bay has also never been above giving a wink and a nod to their own online-ness - after all, this is the band that officially released their own "slowed+reverb" version of one of their most successful early singles.
I could also interpret Imaginal Disk as a timely commentary on all of this "A.I." a.k.a. machine learning snake-oil bullshit, but then I'm not entirely sure that its meant to be referencing that particular venture capitalist dystopian phenomenon, so much as it is generally just playing around with and poking fun at the concept of web 3.0, and a merger between the internet and reality, technology and humans.
There's also a bit of an overarching narrative of being up-ended and thrown into an unfamiliar world. This theme could be pulling its inspiration from a few different sources - a recounting the band's Jewish ancestors that fled Nazi Germany for Argentina, then emigrated to the U.S., or reflecting on the way that Matt and Mica took on the risk of sailing into uncharted territories as self-produced, unconventional independent pop artists after years spent playing in a rock band. It could also be related back to the aforementioned themes of trans-humanism and rapid technological growth, and the mutual sensation of being thrust into the generally tumultuous, rapid-pace, and anxiety-inducing scary new world that is the state of news, pop culture, social media and the internet in the 2020s era.
Idk, there's a lot of layers here, and they all certainly enrich the experience of the record. But what's kind of crazy is that you could pretty much just ignore all of the deeper layers of meaning, tune out all the tongue-in-cheek references to tech-obsession and new age-y spiritualism, and this would still be one of the very most bold, unique, and uncompromising pop records of the last ten or twenty years. The concept is cool and all, but the music alone already speaks for itself and leaves a lasting impression unlike any other pop record of the last few years.
Also, some quick credit where it's due - a huge part of what elevates a decent couple of these tracks is the usage of live drums, and those can be credited to the duo's former Tabula Rasa bandmate Nick Villa.
And now, perhaps my most needlessly long rundown of individual tracks on a record to date 🥴:
"True Blue Interlude" is kind of like a skit with its one minute and fifty seconds runtime, but it's also very much a piece that stands on its own, and actually made its way into my top 3 heaviest rotation of the tracks off this record. You've closed your eyes, seemingly attained nirvana, and now reawaken to find yourself transported to some gorgeous, windswept desert island oasis. The only catch is that you've also somehow found yourself in the middle of a commercial for a prescription drug; or at least it certainly feels like that, except the medicine in this case is the titular disk, applied directly to the forehead. This track makes me weirdly nostalgic for my childhood playing games like Wii Sports and MapleStory, that had these kinda cheesy but very nonetheless endearing, cushy, leisurely and altogether highly pleasant new age soundscapes for BGM. Very early PC music as well, as I'm tempted to describe the lyrics as a little bit "post-ironic".
"Image" is the most immediate cut from the record. It's this all-in-your-face propulsive synth pop spectacle that dives deeper and deeper down a futurstic, funhouse rave rabbit hole as it goes on. The track promotes the ideas of an updated self; a complete makeover into a seemingly perfect version of the you that you've always wanted to be. To me, there's an element of commentary here on the irresistible allure of being noticed and perceived in our hyper-stimulative age of social media and influencer mania. More specficially, the glitz of the production and the overpromising lyrics manage to capture this perverse desire to essentially commodify and compartmentalize the presentation of the self in this sort of unattainable way. And the beat on this thing? Fucking stellar m8.
"Death & Romance" is sort of an Act I climax for the first few tracks of the record. This glorious airshow of an alternative dance song manages to grow wings and learns how to fly, with verses that ebb and flow with changing winds on a majestic cumulonimbus cloud bed of live percussion and glowing piano chords, and the most insanely infectious melody of the entire year. Mica harnesses the power of love and becomes a soaring angel, using her divine aerial powers to make it physically rain good vibes all over the entire surface of the Earth. This track oozes pure awesomeness, kicks every single ass in existence, and makes me fall in love with the very idea of music itself all over again. SOTY contender and it still might not even be my favourite track on the record.
Things wind down a little bit for "Watching T.V.", a song that feels like its floating around those little gloopy blobs inside of a lava lamp, except its an entire sea of the stuff. Mica's delivery is so chill and zen; I love the little way she intonates the "hello, how are you?" in the pre-chorus. Vibraphone is a very nice touch too, I've always considered it a very psychedelic instrument. By the way, is it too much of a cliché or faux-pas at this point to say an electronic pop song incorporating simple wave synths sounds "like a video game"? Whatever, this track is a nice little head massage, at least before it turns into a blindingly bright, technicolor cacophony eruption at the end.
This directly transitions into the beginning of "Tunnel Vision", another one of the record's highest highs. Eerie strings hearken to B-movie horror as the previous track's outro would have seemed to have opened up an eldritch schism in the Earth's crust, except for what emerges from the opening is the soft plinkety sounds of a friendly alien. The rest of this track is just pure geeky prog pop fanservice for nerds who get HORNY at the idea of tempo shifts and 70s homage big band breakdowns in the middle of their cutesy electronic pop song (it's me, I'm the nerd). Plus the absolutely out-of-this-world lift off of an outro with all of the wiry spaceship synth sounds and virtuosic rock drum solo bravado. By the end of it, I'm not entirely sure if I just reached light speed, reached clim😳x, or both simultaneously.
"That's My Floor" is a cartoonish psychedelic pop rock trip that I imagine would immediately follow the melting of crayons with play-doh and then drinking the resulting thick, unicorn-coloured solution (y'know, at least before your stomach rejected it and your kidneys exploded). The electric guitar on this is right crunchy and thunderous. I'm not even entirely sure where this fits in the rest of the album's supposed narrative, it's kind of a wild card, but to be honest I'm really just too busy soaking up all the radioactive fluorescent juices of this certified banger.
The record reaches yet another tremendous climax with "Cry for Me", a heavenly and stratospheric indietronic-disco-prog magnum opus that embraces pop maximalism as though it were a religion. I feel taller than sky scrapers listening to this, with my head up in the cosmos, and shooting stars passing by my ears, meanwhile the universe is my own personal illuminated dancefloor covered in a thick dreamy fog. Mica weaves the story of a sullen person demanding tears and pity for her having supposedly been wronged. After a couple of short verses, the song has its metaphorical head dunked completely underwater for a brief intermission, before coming up gasping for air. It's after this moment that everything really kicks in, and something fundamental about the song shifts as the voice of Mica echos a forlorn "fate, lead me astray".
From here on, I would describe the listening experience as akin to having the most glamorous, cathartic, and theatrical mental breakdown of your life, falling to your knees in the middle of the spotlight of an empty auditorium, begging and pleading to your only witness, the highest power, while being completely at the mercy of an uncaring universe. "Shared a little kiss and that's forever / think of love when you remember me" is my favourite lyric in any pop song of the last few years - its such a deliciously simple and bittersweet sentiment. Mica's practically kicking and screaming for acknowledgement by the fading of the outro. This track brings a whole new, much more literal meaning to the term "pity party", and I have definitely listened to this during some of my most stressful moments over the past year, and have felt immense release because of it. At the very moment of writing this review, I will say that this is my favourite off the record, and my definitive song of the year.
The penultimate "Angel On A Satellite" is a tender piano ballad complete with gentle pitter-patter hand drums and a cozy acoustic guitar. Chorus is absolutely killer, especially thanks to the little key change, and that recurring refrain hits me right in the sweet spot, even if its basically an interpretation of the standard major scale on piano. I could very much see this not being someone else's thing - it might be a little too sincere for the cynical, but I'd be a damn liar if I didn't admit that this makes me choke up a little bit inside. Sure, it's a fair bit simpler as far as what we've come to normally expect from Magdalena Bay, but it's also soooooooooooo incredibly effective.
"The Ballad of Matt & Mica" ends the record on the most fell-good, triumphant note, like a victory lap or a sigh of relief, and it puts a big ol' grin on my face every time I listen to it. The melody and lyrics interpolate those of the opening track, offering a moment to reflect on the journey that both the band and listener just completed, and just that aspect of the song alone gives me goosebumps every time I listen to it. It's really as if you just scaled a mountain, and now you're looking back, thinking to yourself like "yeah, I actually did that". The little shots on the "bang! bang! and a happy ending" really seals the deal. Matt and Mica sound damn happy and proud of what they made here and yeah, they really should be. You just gotta root for these two.
This is a landmark record in pop music. So rare is it that a record of any genre comes across feeling so complete, so much what it was always meant to be. In a very meta-way, Imaginal Disk really delivers on its inter-textual promises on tracks like "Image" and "True Blue Interlude" of an experience that feels elevated, hyper-real even.
For the love of god, just listen to the masterpiece record already. It's 11:00 pm on a Friday, on the last day of February and my fingers are officially done typing. Happy 2025, folks (all three or four of you), sorry it took this long.
10/10
Highlights: "Cry for Me", "Death & Romance", "Tunnel Vision", "Angel On A Satellite", "Image", "True Blue Interlude", "That's My Floor", "Watching T.V.", "The Ballad of Matt & Mica", "Killing Time", "Love Is Everywhere", "Fear, Sex"
FOR FANS OF:
Impossible Princess by Kylie Minogue
Merriweather Post-Pavilion by Animal Collective
Djinn by Lingua Nada
Head First by Goldfrapp
Shoso Strip by Sheena Ringo
Desire, I Want to Turn Into You by Caroline Polachek
