Cover Feature Magdalena Bay: Dream Team

But to Mica and Matthew, success didn’t come overnight. The duo met at an after-school programme in 2011 and started a prog-rock band, having already dabbled in music separately. “This sounds cliched, but ever since I was nine and I picked up a guitar, I knew that’s what I wanted to do,” Matthew recalls.

“Growing up, I loved writing songs, but I didn’t think I could do that professionally. Our parents work in business - we’re not in LA, we’re just in Miami,” Mica adds. “For our parents, it was like, this is not a thing that people do,” Lewin explains. “It’s not real”.

As college approached, the pair split. Matthew would study music business at Northeastern University, while Mica pursued communications at the prestigious University of Pennsylvania. But as she completed “supposed dream jobs”, Mica knew she was “miserable”. “I was like, ‘I really miss making music’,” she remembers thinking. “That was actually my favourite part of myself: writing songs”. They eventually reconnected romantically and artistically during college, and Mica presented Matthew with artists she had discovered during her time at Pennsylvania.

Suddenly, pop had a new lease on life. The couple formed their new band, Magdalena Bay, inspired by nu-gen innovators like Grimes, Chairlift, Charli xcx and influential label PC Music: “It’s winking about what pop is and could be,” explains Mica. “That blew our minds at the time. We were like, ‘oh, you can play with it, that’s cool. What if we tried that?’”

Except that didn’t happen. “What we actually had to do, slowly, was self-develop creatively with no one caring,” Mica recalls. “The important thing was to realise that the creative aspect needs to come from yourself - you’re not going to find a creative director or someone who’s going to make your art better,” Matthew affirms.

Even if what they wrote didn’t make sense for Magdalena Bay at the time, they credit that period as essential to shaping their future sound. “No matter how “weird” or “experimental” we get, there needs to be something you can listen to for the first time and have that melody stay with you,” Matthew summarises. “That’s an integral part of what we look for when we write.”

After several ‘mini-mixes’, the band released their 2021 debut record, ‘Mercurial World’. They were true partners-in-crime, with Mica’s entrancing, airy vocals and knack for effortless earworms complementing Matthew’s slick dance-pop and chillwave production. The duo also found success on TikTok, too, for their lo-fi, absurdist videos; Mica answers a rotary phone in one, intoning: “Your inner demons are calling”. After a series of demonic screams, she hangs up, looking deeply disturbed.

Combined together, ‘Mercurial World’ established Magdalena Bay as underground pop stars with killer writing skills and a singular artistic identity. It allowed them to quit their jobs and focus on music full time; just a year later, they were touring with Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek and Charli XCX. Turns out, that was just the beginning of what they had up their sleeves - and when it was time to write their next record, they knew they wanted to push the envelope.

“I think the industry does underestimate people’s attention spans,” Matthew observes. “Or desire for something a little more…” “…Something more to digest,” Mica concludes.

At the same time, Mica was restarting therapy, meeting with her high school therapist, who specialised in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Lacan is famous for developing the concept of the ‘mirror stage’: the period where one begins to recognise their image in a metaphorical mirror. The drama of life, according to Lacan, stems from this confusion. Is the self internal, or is the mirror image more “real”? If the image you see is “truer”, but you don’t quite like it - or you like it a little too much - what does that mean for you?

“I haven’t done another therapy, but to me, it’s what I imagine therapy is; this interest in dreams, the subconscious and the past,” she says. “That’s very inspiring to me creatively. Making music is this weird subconscious process: all the time, words and images are coming out that you don’t really expect or search for. They just come from somewhere.”

On a personal level, the record is an exploration of self, she explains: “this attempt to look at myself in a way that I hadn’t before. There is resistance there, and then acceptance of what I saw and what I learned about myself”. But she stresses that listeners don’t need a deep knowledge of Lacan to appreciate the album: “What’s so fun about making music is that lyric writing is so open-ended that I could make my own world, rather than doing a bunch of research. I like reading just enough about certain concepts to get me inspired and then go from there.”

Instead, Mica’s therapy sessions spiralled into a multi-dimensional sci-fi world. They teased fans with a website boasting a glorious retro map, plotting mysterious spaces like The Installation Center and The Outskirts. Each location hid snippets of lyrics and clues to the narrative, which the duo began to configure once they were about “80% done” with the music.

It was their reactions to the music that helped guide the direction of the record. “It was trying to figure out musically: how does the story play out? What are the beats of the narrative through the tone of the music?” Matthew says.

“It was all anchored around the music and what we would visualise when listening to it,” Mica adds, recalling that ‘Image’ held one of the earliest visual ideas for the record. “As soon as we made that song, I was like: I see this thing with the face being changed, these robot hands coming in and that works with this idea of the disk. Then it’s like, how does that relate to this disk? It’s chipping away at the subconscious imagery and inserting some more conscious imagery for other things.”

Aspiring to become Ghost, True sees an ad from a sinister Doctor promoting the titular Imaginal Disk: an elusive operation that promises to uncover “the purest you”. True elects to proceed, and chaos ensues.

These characters would be central to bringing the pair’s high-concept narrative to life, and the band fleshed them out early in the process. “That was actually a big point for us,” Lewin says. “You could do concepts in a record, but once you add characters to it, you have a certain narrative that goes along with it.”

There are endless possibilities as to what the narrative could be. Magdalena Bay have their own idea of the story on top, but listeners are free to interpret the record in whatever way they want, or to ignore it entirely.

“We’ve always loved world-building with our music and what we put out, but the reality is someone could just listen to the songs, and that’s fine too,” muses Mica. “We think it’s fun when there is this sci-fi story in the music videos, the website, but it all revolves around the music at the core.”

Magdalena Bay’s sci-fi bent has been key to their artistic identity and success - and for them, writing from such a lens is automatic. “It’s fun and aesthetically interesting - there’s so much more room to play with things than if you’re just writing about yourself,” Matthew adds. “The images you’re able to conjure up when you’re speaking of things: flying, angel on a satellite, whatever it is. The synth sounds that we pick are also evocative of sci-fi; they have this spacey quality”.

While writing ‘Imaginal Disk’, Mica read novels like Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, which influenced the feel of the record. “What I remember is these very long, surreal and cool descriptions of this alien planet,” she tells us. “I do think the vibe of the book is very related to the music, and there is a very cool exploration of self. We like the idea of the music and everything working to conjure up a movie inside your head.”

As an outfit, the pair have been so eager to make a film that as soon as they finished ‘Mercurial World’, they began plotting how to turn ‘Imaginal Disk’ into a movie. “We did go into ‘Imaginal Disk’ very early on thinking we wanted to do that,” Mica tells us. “We filmed the whole thing in May of 2024, it was such an ambitious undertaking.”

The album’s forthcoming movie accompaniment spans the length of the entire record; to film fifteen music videos, the pair took just four days - “which is wild!”. There were many sleepless nights, they tell us; for instance, they couldn’t see their costumes until the first day of shooting. “It looked amazing, thank God, but it could have not been,” Mica sighs with relief.

Despite teasing its release as “imminent”, they pair are still working on it, they say: the whole film was filmed on green screen, which, turns out, is a pain to process in post-production. But the band have still found ways to sneak snippets into their wider world; the music videos are all lifted from the film, while fans have spotted unseen footage used in their live sets as well.

Refusing to rest on their laurels, every new tour leg has equally seen new production from the duo. Surreal props like flying eyes and alien rocks have crept onto the stage, and the band have slowly recruited more tour crew to help with the increased demands. By now, Magdalena Bay have played over 100 shows - and as they gear up to play their last leg, including their biggest UK headline to date at Brixton Academy, it’s easy to wonder how they plan to up the stakes for the final time.

“We’ve been lucky enough that every time we do a new run, it’s a level up of room sizes and stages,” says Mica. “We want to rise to that occasion.”

But they do sound genuinely amazed at what the album has managed to achieve. The album didn’t top the charts, nor was it propelled by virality, necessarily, but its streams speak volumes, consistently growing since its release. People are appreciating ‘Imaginal Disk’ for the odyssey it is, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed by the band.

“People are saying that everything’s short-form now, but people obviously still really care about albums,” says Mica. “It’s more of a holistic thing - which as an artist, is so awesome.”

It’s not just their attention to detail that makes Magdalena Bay so unstoppable. For ten years now, Mica and Matthew have had the tenacity to make things work, tiny budgets and dwindling hours be damned. It’s the kind of perseverance only unlocked by their unshakeable connection as partners, forged since they were teens back in Florida.

“For me, Matt always having that vision was helpful to me to be like, okay, I guess we could do music,” Mica notes. “Putting so much time and effort into making the music, the videos, it becomes who you are. Then I felt like I had no choice: this is what I was going to do, whether it was successful or not.”

We note that by now, Magdalena Bay have worked with all the pop artists they cite as kick-starting their foundation. The fact that they’ve achieved this legacy - and more - within two albums sounds unreal. “If we went to us 10 years ago and told them, our brains would explode,” Mica smiles. “I mean, it’s our dreams coming true.”

‘Imaginal Disk’ is out now via Mom+Pop.

Tags: Cover Features, Features, February 2026, From The Magazine, Magdalena Bay