“So how long have we been your favorite band?” Magdalena Bay’s Mica Tenenbaum deadpans to me, as her partner Matthew Lewin captures the exchange with a ’90s camcorder. We are in the pair’s L.A. apartment, filming one of their signature absurdist TikToks. The exceedingly meta premise they’ve workshopped is that they (Magdalena Bay) are woefully unprepared when I (Pitchfork journalist) ask to watch them film one of their signature absurdist TikToks—so they commandeer the interview. The humor does not rely on punchlines so much as painfully awkward pacing and Eurodance music. “Should we get you both in front of the green screen in case you want to do something stupid?” Lewin asks. Tenenbaum and I hold hands and run in a circle, like evil twins summoning a demon. I can’t help but wonder: Will this make sense to anyone who’s not stoned?
Everything needed to film their kitschy, VHS-style videos is packed into the apartment’s modest living room-turned-studio. Nearby is a closet of props, obscured by an iridescent fringe curtain and three guitars—four, if you count a Guitar Hero console. There’s a rack of cables, a decorative Greco-Roman column, a digital photo frame filled with GIFs, and a desk stationed with their production gear and computer monitor. While Magdalena Bay specialize in slinky, retro pop music, what really sets the duo apart is their ever-expanding multimedia universe: surreal TikToks, weekly Twitch streams, vaporwave-y music videos featuring Bill Clinton sax solos. It’s like they’re the only two employees at a start-up, and the product is themselves.
They have their online personas: Tenenbaum, 25, embodies a bratty starlet, looking pouty and underwhelmed, and Lewin, 26, resembles a stoic producer-savant. In person, they feel like your sibling’s friends, half-strangers you stumble upon playing Wii while you’re still in pajamas. “This is pretty much it,” Lewin replies when I request a tour, blinking at their immediate surroundings. Soon after, we stroll into the kitchen, which is home to a picture of a cartoon kettle saying “Bitch, Make Me Tea!” and cabinets that don’t close. “Off the record, this apartment is a shithole,” Lewin says. “Or on the record,” Tenenbaum shrugs.
The juxtaposition between the scrappiness of their work conditions and the breadth and polish of their music becomes especially apparent on the pair’s upcoming debut album, Mercurial World. Elements of their tongue-in-cheek humor peek out on the record’s skits, which establish a mind-expanding theory of time: “Matt, Matt, wake up!” Tenenbaum whispers at the beginning, “I was thinking about how there’s no true end to anything.” The title track is soaring and frictionless, like an invincible Mario gobbling up coins, while the album’s palette includes everything from crunchy rock guitars to easy listening piano to Robyn-style house synths. It’s opulent, fun, and immaculately produced.
Scattered on the coffee table are baby pink and blue brochures they’ve been mailing out to select fans, directing them to a cryptic Y2K-style website full of old-school GIFs, spammy news articles, and clues about the forthcoming record. A crystal ball icon routes visitors to a mysterious text box: “Tell me, what do you wish to know?” Tenenbaum made the site herself.
While Tenenbaum is at the computer, checking the site’s analytics, Lewin gets a text notifying him that there’s chatter in the Magdalena Bay Discord server, which a fan started in late 2019 after discovering the band on the r/popheads subreddit. “Oh, let’s see!” Tenenbaum says, leaping up. In the main chat, people post snapshots of their brochures and reactions to the endless features on the Mercurial World website. “I feel like i’m now in a cult,” one fan says.
Over a decade before they were drawing in fans with elaborate release schemes and intentionally tacky graphic design, Tenenbaum and Lewin met as gawky teenagers at an afterschool music program in Miami. They started dating and writing songs together, eventually forming a prog-rock band called Tabula Rosa, releasing two albums and developing a “very small fan base of middle-aged men,” as Lewin recalls. After they went to college in separate states, they broke up, and new music writing stalled. Tenenbaum, the studious one, went to the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied communications and performed with an all-female sketch comedy troupe; Lewin attended Northeastern, where he pursued a music business track, despite having no interest in eventually wasting away at a label.
Then, one winter break, they reconnected personally and creatively, looking to a trifecta of left-of-center pop releases—Chairlift’s Moth, Charli XCX’s Vroom Vroom EP, and especially Grimes’ Art Angels—as models for a new venture. “We thought that after making 20-minute prog-rock tracks, pop music would be super easy,” Lewin remembers. (It was not.) They poached the name “Magdalena Bay” from Maggie Bay, an administrator who would occasionally email Lewin at his IT job, and released their debut single “VOC POP” in 2016. The song sounds like what it is: the imperfect result of two pop autodidacts trying to recreate their object of study. (“Love is like a radio song,” Tenenbaum sings on it.) For videos, the duo arrived at an offbeat visual style dictated by long-distance and affordability, reliant on free VHS footage from the Internet Archive.
After college, they moved to L.A., where they slogged through day jobs at a hotel and yoga content studio only to perform miserable gigs at near-empty venues at night. At one point, Lewin broke his arm after hitting a pothole while riding an electric scooter and was forced to play keyboard with one hand. A publishing deal fell through. Worried that they were stagnating, they developed the idea to make quick music videos to one-minute songs and upload them to YouTube. Their “mini mix” series solidified their multimedia approach and led to a deal with Luminelle Recordings, the label co-founded by Gorilla vs. Bear music blogger Chris Cantalini. “It was a way to crank out content,” says Tenenbaum. “But for some reason, people seemed to connect to those videos even more than some of the official singles we put out.”
In the two years since, they’ve spit out projects at a quick clip—first an EP, A Little Rhythm and a Wicked Feeling, then a second mini mix volume. Their charm is in their irreverence and spontaneity, how their output both embodies and reacts to internet absurdity. A few months ago, “Killshot”—a sexy, thumping song from their EP— unexpectedly went viral after a slowed-down version began soundtracking thirsty anime fancams. After smartly releasing an official slowed + reverb remix, Magdalena Bay also used the situation as fodder for flip TikToks. In one, they’re playing Wii bowling when a no-nonsense label head—represented by the pink Nintendo character Kirby—demands a “Killshot 2.” They grind away at the project, speeding and chopping, recording new vocals. “Now play it back,” Tenenbaum says. Cue a plinking dancehall rhythm and Ed Sheeran blissfully singing, “I’m in love with the shape of you.”
TikTok content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
They wrote Mercurial World in about a year, starting in March 2020 after the pandemic canceled months of planned tour dates, and have spent the past six months strategizing the rollout. “We’ve never been so intentional about our release before,” says Tenenbaum. “Literally, for the EP, we were finishing the songs as we put them out.”
For “Chaeri,” the album’s lead single, they were able to hire a professional team for the video instead of still self-directing and producing in their apartment. It’s the most hi-fi production they’ve ever done, a self-proclaimed “abstract, sci-fi cybercult, symbology-ridden, laser light show masterpiece” shot at a onetime Masonic temple and a proper film studio. But their DIY impulses aren’t gone. They ironed the designs onto the shirts that the video’s extras wear and bought 10 clocks as props—clunky digital alarms, dainty analog ones—which now lay in various places in the apartment. At precisely 2:59 p.m., our interview is interrupted by one of them. “It’s like rocket science,” Tenenbaum sighs, still unsure how to stop the beeping.
Mica Tenenbaum: We saw Uncut Gems on my birthday, and at the end, there was a song [“L’Amour Toujours”] by Gigi D’Agostino. It was so beautiful.
Matthew Lewin: That was our jumping-off point. The beat I made had a synth line and a four-on-the-floor beat.
Tenenbaum: Then I tried a million rounds of melodies. I was so stuck, but I wouldn’t give up. Eventually, it came out. We were cooking dinner, and I sang the chorus and recorded it into Logic. After dinner, we refined it and wrote the verse. Lyrically, the song ended up being about guilt and loneliness. It’s happened to me before, where maybe a friend is having a mental health struggle, and maybe I haven’t done my best to be there. I’m just like, “Oh, they’ll be OK, it’s just whatever.” I really like the darkness of it.
Lewin: So GIFCities has a collection of all the GIFs used on GeoCities websites. The coolest thing is that you can click on any GIF and see what website it came from, and they’re all from these early 2000s sites that are archived.
Tenenbaum: [browsing GIFCities] I literally just clicked this GIF, and it took me to a website dedicated to a goat and her daughters.
Lewin: [reads goat site] “Her sweet-tasting milk adds to our table, and we are certain her sweet personality will add to our herd.”
Lewin: I guess, pre-social media, you would just make a website for stuff like this instead of just putting it on Instagram.
Tenenbaum: It feels so voyeuristic, though! We were reading this girl’s blog, and she poured her heart out about her boyfriend and how it was all intertwined with her love for 311.
Tenenbaum: We were bored at night. We’d played Zelda, and we’d watched all of David Lynch’s work…
Lewin: We were looking for those old flash games we used to play as kids, and we came across some archived websites.
Tenenbaum: There’s a subreddit called r/ForgottenWebsites. And then, we found the Time Cube website, which inspired the idea for our own.
Tenenbaum: This guy had a theory… about like… time being a cube?
Lewin: I don’t think it makes any sense, to be honest. But it’s very cool to look at.
Lewin: That’s definitely a result of COVID and feeling like we were wasting a full year.
Tenenbaum: Plus, we hit our mid-20s.
Lewin: Yes, coinciding with a quarter-life crisis. And obviously, as pop musicians, time is something that’s constantly on our minds. So this idea is like a coping mechanism: Where you end up when you die is the same place as where you end up before you’re born, right? So if those two points are the same, then there is no true end. The lack of finality is comforting.
Tenenbaum: Matt had this instrumental, and the melody I wrote over it just wasn’t working. So we tried to be a little experimental. We were watching all of those Hatsune Miku compilations on YouTube—another pandemic rabbit hole. If I taught school, I would make it mandatory to have at least one hour a day of getting lost on the internet. It’s good for young brains’ development.
Lewin: We tried to buy a vocaloid, but it was pretty expensive, like $300. So Mica just imitated a vocaloid with her mouth, and then I put some effects on it. There’s something about the uncanny valley thing that’s very appealing to us, like when you see a puppet that looks very human but is not quite there. It’s very creepy.