Synth-pop is nothing revolutionary in the modern-day pop landscape. But there are few projects as exciting, innovative, and consistent as Magdelena Bay’s (Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin’s) sophomore album Imaginal Disk. In just the 2 months that this album has been out, Imaginal Disk has easily become my favorite of the year. Throughout its runtime, it deals with themes of humanity, mortality, and the often dark and painful yet transcendental metamorphoses involved in self-growth. Take the album title, Imaginal Disk—a clever play on the words “disc” vs. “disk.” This can refer to either “imaginal discs,” structures found inside the larvae of certain insects that eventually grow into the body parts of the insect’s adult form, or to the type of digitized music disk we see inserted into Tenenbaum’s head on the album cover. This double meaning, intrinsic to the concept of the album, conflates this biological transformation with Tenenbaum and Lewin's. Imaginal Disk takes listeners on 15 distinct dream sequences that delve into sub-aspects of this metamorphosis. 

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This album opens with a bang. “She Looked Like Me!” is a grand experimental pop epic that describes Tenenbaum and Lewin’s childhoods—their parents’ immigration to America and their past history with war, both of which exposed them to violence at an early age.  

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“Down the line, over the waves

Two kids and a military

Turn their tongue, change their name

La love, born to marry

Crossed their hearts, crossing the earth

One year, then a baby's carried

Grows up young, screams at graves

Bang-bang and it's customary

Ordinary”

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In these 8 lines alone, this opener sets the tone and foreshadows the themes of change, growth, violence, and love that will be discussed throughout this album. 

The track “True Blue Interlude,” in my opinion, marks the thesis of this album. It formally establishes the ideas around one’s true self, the “purest you,” and how there are parts inside everyone that have laid dormant for lifespans and generations “in memory, mirror, and membrane” (perhaps a reference to imaginal discs). It’s a dreamy and otherworldly song that introduces a recurrent auditory motif of 3 piano keys, later used in “Feeling DiskInserted?” “True Blue Interlude” is the perfect precursor to the track “Image,” the album’s lead single, which deals with very similar themes: finding your new image, a better version of yourself, and letting it change you, become you, and consume you. 

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“Watching T.V.” takes the themes of yearning, love, and desire discussed in previous tracks, and flips them on their heads into something much more sinister. In the context of heartbreak, the narrator realizes that they need to completely strip themselves of the monsters both inside and around them, a metaphor for the shortcomings, insecurities, and traumas that follow us throughout our lives but remain inert, until of course they decide to gnaw their way to the surface. As this realization occurs, the track transforms from what was originally a more muted and intimate space into an expansive, lofty, almost unsettling climax, supported by Tenenbaum’s distorted vocals, layers of synths and drums, and a powerfully haunting melody.

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The album’s penultimate track, “Angel on a Satellite,” is one of the softer songs on this album, but still employs the same disco-esque soundscape we’ve heard on other songs like “Death & Romance” and “Cry for Me.” Accompanied by a lavish piano progression that runs through the song, Tenenbaum reinforces the theme of love—learning how to do it, learning how to accept it, and above all, learning how someone else does it. 

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Imaginal Disk is what happens when a creative concept meets two musical geniuses. Nothing about this album seems like an after-thought. Everything is fully fleshed out—the lyrics, the production, the transitions and track sequencing, the concept-building. On the final track, “The Ballad of Matt & Mica,” Tenenbaum and Lewin cement all of the themes and ideas presented throughout the album. This track serves as a callback to track 1, “She Looked Like Me!” It uses the same melodic progression and contains many lyrical references to it. On track 1, they referred to their lineage and upbringing as “ordinary” and “customary”; they’d grown to normalize the perpetual violence their parents routinely instilled in them. This is contrasted on the final track, one of the most personally reflective songs on the album. They contemplate their future, their place in the world, and their love—now under a new light, one in which such violence is not ordinary.  

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“Oh, is it my heart? Is it my brain?

La love and a song to carry

Killing time every day

Bang-bang, never ending

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Is it my luck? Is it my fate?

Not ordinary

Not ordinary”

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It seems the metamorphosis was successful.