Magdalena Bay are bringing back the heady concept album. Much of contemporary pop music is concerned with past trauma, astrological signs, and capital-V Vulnerability, and it feels like ridiculously conceptual pop music has fallen to the wayside in lieu of self-mythologization and not-so-subtle autobiography. On the other hand, the pop duo comprising Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin made a record about a character named True, whose body rejects a “disk upgrade” forced into their forehead by aliens, designed to bridge the speculative connections between humans and apes. Or something like that.

The album in question — Imaginal Disk, out this Friday — underlines a different type of vulnerability, one in which truly believing in your outlandish ideas pays off to the highest extent. The whole narrative is as unapologetically weird as the music is relentlessly catchy. If Grimes wasn’t up to whatever the hell she’s doing right now and went back to making excellent synth-pop in the vein of Art Angels, then it would probably sound something like Magdalena Bay.

Still, the ideas presented here are entirely Tenenbaum and Lewin’s own. Even aside from the sci-fi story bred into the record, the music itself is immaculate. It refines on the solid, shimmery foundation the two established on their debut, 2021’s Mercurial World, by somehow making their world even more mercurial. These songs take twists and turns that mirror the futuristic bent of the lyrics, and it’s immediately memorable despite its thrilling unpredictability. The Miami-bred, Los Angeles-based musicians double down on their ideas here, and it’s refreshing to hear glimmering pop music that is this unafraid of itself, carving its own singular path.

It makes you wonder where one even gets these kinds of ideas in the first place, so it only seemed natural to probe Lewin and Tenenbaum’s brains about the inspirations that led to Imaginal Disk. In a wide-ranging conversation, the duo shared how Suspiria (1977), Fiona Apple, ELO, the Unarius Academy of Science, and more influenced their excellent new album. Below, press play on new single “That’s My Floor” and enter the world of Magdalena Bay.

Paul McCartney

MICA TENENBAUM: I got into my first Beatles phase and then Paul McCartney phase in 2022, which would have been right as we were starting to write the album. So that’s probably some sort of influence, right?

MATTHEW LEWIN: Yeah, it was fun. I’ve been a lifelong Beatles guy, and it was fun to go chronologically through their discography with Mica.

TENENBAUM: I remember it was right when that documentary came out, which was so fun. I’ve been obsessed with Ram ever since.

Get Back is what made you dive in?

LEWIN: It came out right when we were starting to go through chronologically. So it was probably what brought it up for me. I was like, “You should probably get familiar with the history to appreciate it.”

Is Paul your favorite Beatle, then?

TENENBAUM: Yes, I think so.

LEWIN: I’ve always been a George guy my whole life, and then I think Paul took over as my favorite in the last maybe five years or so or during this deep dive we’ve done.

The documentary kind of portrays him as this mastermind behind the whole enterprise. And George is just like, “I want to be more involved.” And he’s like, “No, do what you’re told.”

LEWIN: For sure. It’s kind of annoying. But he’s good, which makes him annoying is that he’s undeniably good. [laughs] What can you do?

Fiona Apple

TENENBAUM: We’ve been Fiona Apple fans for a long, long, long time. And in high school, when we were in a progressive rock band together, she was a very big songwriting influence for me. So it aligns with this situation where, as we were starting to write this album, we were listening more to what we were listening to in high school and revisiting things and regressing a little bit. [laughs] We totally stopped listening to any contemporary music and delved into Fiona Apple, a little bit of Radiohead, and some ’70s stuff. I feel like, in some way, she might have influenced the songwriting a little bit more than some previous Magdalena Bay stuff.

Björk’s Score For Dancer In The Dark

Is Björk also within that, as you put it, regressive high school era?

LEWIN: We watched Dancer In The Dark, which was new for me. I’d never seen it before even though I was into Björk for a while. That’s one of the things where we picked up on little elements, like the opener track to that film score is just this beautiful horn arrangement. It’s like, French horns and trombones and all brass. In that aspect, it really made us want to include more orchestral brass on this album, and there are a few songs on it that were pretty directly inspired by that and in some of the brass arrangements. I guess it’s probably not an overall songwriting influence. It’s more just like little things here and there.

Donkey Skin

TENENBAUM: We’re fairly inspired by that visually, just the sets and the color. As we’ve been working on our videos, films in that vein have been a big source of inspiration for us.

LEWIN: There’s something about the color palette or the set design. We were watching just generally the way film looked in that era of late ’60s and ’70s. It’s not something that we are following directly because our music videos don’t have that. They’re filmed on green screen, so we don’t have those practical status backdrops, but hopefully there’s something we’re taking from that because we do love it so much.

TENENBAUM: So whether it’s the color treatment or just some sort of mood, there’s some inspiration going through.

Peter Gabriel Music Videos

LEWIN: Obviously “Sledgehammer” is the big Peter Gabriel video that everyone knows and loves. But you have to watch the video for “Steam.”

TENENBAUM: That might be my favorite, I gotta say.

LEWIN: It’s like peak early CGI craziness; it looks so horrible but so cool at the same time. “Sledgehammer” is amazing because it’s all stop-motion, and you can see the frame-by-frame work. It has such a nice look to it. But “Steam” is just so cool in a completely opposite way where it’s so obviously digital. There’s something really funny and cool about that.

Suspiria (1977)

What stood out to you about this film?

TENENBAUM: Just the visual and musical mood that comes across. More recently, we’ve been into movies like that. The mood that is conveyed in that movie is very strong through the lighting and through everything about it, so it’s very cool.

LEWIN: The music is also funny in that movie. I think it was made by this prog band. But it’s this crazy synth-rock with wailing vocals and this drum thing that just keeps going… I don’t know. Again, going back to the colors, they just look different, and I feel like it’s really hard to replicate the way those movies looked, but there’s something special about the colors and the lighting.

What is it about the film’s colors that resonate with you and the music you make?

LEWIN: I think it’s like what Mica was saying. It evokes a specific mood. With our music, we’re trying to evoke the same feeling by the way that film makes colors look. It captures a mood that you obviously can’t put into words, but it’s something special. You could say it’s nostalgic or whatever. But I think it’s a little bit more than that.

TENENBAUM: There’s a uniqueness to it, too. It feels very different from what you would see now, which feels very special, and it also transports you in a way when you’re looking at something so otherworldly and so surreal.

LEWIN: It’s not going for naturalism or realism. It’s trying to get the most color that they could out of the film in a way that ends up looking hyperreal, which is something we try to accomplish with music in a similar way.

Electric Light Orchestra

TENENBAUM: We’ve loved ELO forever. I don’t know if you’ve done a formal revisiting of them in recent years. But I’ve always been so amazed by their arrangements and the use of strings and how it toes the line between drama, playfulness, and melodrama, but it’s done with so much care and mastery. You take it seriously, but you don’t, but you do. It’s just amazing. It’s a very earnest melodrama, which is cool.

Unarius Academy Of Science

TENENBAUM: If you were to Google that or look it up on YouTube, there are some crazy visual vibes going on. A while ago we did this deep dive into them, but it’s like some sort of religious sect or semi-cult. [laughs] But they just had me, and they would make these videos where the founder or leader of it at the time, this woman, would wear these insane fucking dresses with flashing planets on them. They would be in these crazy Teletubbies-esque settings and really go all out with this world-building they’re doing for some reason, and it’s very sick.

LEWIN: I think you can visit their old headquarters. I don’t know their current headquarters, but the old one’s somewhere in California. We thought about going a month ago, but we decided against it.

TENENBAUM: We should go! [laughs] It’s very interestingly decorated for sure.

LEWIN: It looks like a weird museum–

TENENBAUM: Slash movie set.

Flash Gordon

TENENBAUM: We saw it pretty recently as we were getting into solidifying our visuals.

LEWIN: We were on our mixing trip for the record, which was at Dave Fridmann’s studio in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York. The studio is where the artists and bands would sleep and live while they either recorded or mixed their records. So we were sleeping in this room with two little single beds, and it’s probably been decorated the same way since 1997 or whenever they opened, but the entertainment they had for us was a Nintendo 64 and a PlayStation 2. And then they had a LaserDisc player. Dave has this huge collection of LaserDiscs.

So we were talking about our music videos, and he was like, “Oh, it sounds like Flash Gordon. You should really check it out,” and I didn’t know anything about it besides the Queen soundtrack. So we watched it. There’s the film itself but also the combination of how the film looks on the LaserDisc, which essentially adds, if you were to describe it in modern terminology, a noise filter. It’s similar to what vinyl does to a record where it changes the tone of the video in a way that’s really cool, and Flash Gordon has these crazy colors. All the skies in the film are like swirling oil in a fish tank. Again, it’s hyperreal with the colors, and that being put through this LaserDisc evokes a crazy feeling that we’re really into right now.

Hausu (aka House)

TENENBAUM: Hausu has been inspiring us for a few years at this point, but it’s perfect with the way it looks. Also, there’s hyperreal skies like in Flash Gordon; it’s the swirling oil paint and these painted sets that are very hyperreal, too. There’s this mix of practical effects and really crazy graphic design and editing elements that are so cool for the time and in general. It’s a big source of inspiration. It’s just a really, really cool movie.

LEWIN: Again, you’re not going for realism; you’re going for crazy stylization. I don’t know if that’s them working within [the limitations of the time] probably. You’re not trying to go for realism, but it ends up being really cool.

Shana Moulton

TENENBAUM: She’s a really cool artist we’ve come across recently. We saw one of her films, and we saw a segment of the show that is so cool. And then she had this installation at MoMA. We didn’t make it there. Hopefully we could catch it sometime soon. But it’s very cool production design and playing with video, but video in a real space, and with a sort of architecture that sucks you in in some sort of way. It’s like things aren’t quite where they should be, but it’s all working together, and it looks very nice and strange.

Imaginal Disk is out 8/23 on Mom+Pop.