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Dec 30, 2025 Issue #74 - The Protest Issue with Kathleen Hanna and Bartees Strange By Mark Redfern Photography by Lissyelle Laricchia

My Firsts is our email interview series where we ask musicians to tell us about their first life experiences, be it early childhood ones (first word, first concert, etc.) or their first tastes of being a musician (first band, first tour, etc.). For this My Firsts we talk to Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin of the Los Angeles-based electro-pop duo Magdalena Bay.

The follow-up to their acclaimed debut album, 2021’s Mercurial World, Magdalena Bay’s sophomore album, Imaginal Disk, was #1 on Under the Radar’s Top 100 Albums of 2024 list. It’s an ambitious sci-fi loose-concept album about a character named True who has a compact disc-like object inserted into her forehead in order to help her create a better version of herself. True rejects the process and starts to reclaim her humanity. While this might sound like an uninviting and abstract idea for an album, the music on Imaginal Disk is fully accessible, albeit sometimes a little off-kilter and quirky (all in wondrous ways).

The duo wrote, produced, and recorded the album themselves, recording most of it in their home studio, which is all the more jaw-dropping when you hear the lush and intricately produced LP. It’s the equivalent of an IMAX blockbuster made on a living room green screen, which is also how the duo used to make most of their music videos. Now on a bigger label (Mom + Pop), the videos for three of Imaginal Disk’s singles were no longer self-directed, but were helmed by Amanda Kramer and all were interconnected and tied into the album’s concept, with visual influences including the 1980 Flash Gordon film and the videos of Peter Gabriel, as well as the Y2K aesthetic the band has long been known for. The sounds on Imaginal Disk run the gamut from danceable electro-pop (“Image”) to psych-rock (“Tunnel Vision”) to dream pop (“Vampire in the Corner”) to ABBA-influenced ’70s disco (“Cry For Me”). And yet it all sounds unmistakably like Magdalena Bay, a true blue original in a crowded musical landscape filled with so many interchangeable artists.

On April 17, 2026 the band will be releasing Nice Day: A Collection of Singles, which collects all eight of their 2025 singles in a 7-inch box set.

Tenenbaum and Lewin met when they were in high school in Miami and are also romantic partners. Read on as they discuss first crushes, early TV shows and albums they were into, getting fired, and the same song they both happened to separately first perform in public.

First best friend?

Mica Tenenbaum: I think my friend Anna was my first ever best friend, back in pre-K. There’s camcorder footage of us from our first day of school and you can see us playing with some baby dolls in the background. It’s very sweet because she now dates our drummer Nick.

First broken bone?

Matthew Lewin and Mica: Neither of us had ever broken a bone until the week after we moved to LA. Matt fell off a Bird scooter and got a hairline fracture on his wrist. It healed great. The ER doctor said he saw cracked skulls from those scooters on the daily.

First TV show you were obsessed with?

Mica: Barney. My parents and I moved to Miami from Argentina when I was two years old. I think I learned English from watching and rewatching Barney.

First album you bought?

Matt: 2007, I bought an In Rainbows CD on a school field trip in Washington D.C. I only knew (and loved) The Bends before that, and my intense Radiohead obsession started shortly after.

First musician you had a crush on?

Mica: Gerard Way from My Chemical Romance was my first and most intense musician crush because I was 11/12. I don’t think I’ll ever experience such an intense degree of fandom over someone again. I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently. Of course there’s music and musicians that I admire now, but that level of pre-teen insanity is just one of a kind.

First actor or actress you had a crush on?

Matt: I would get home from elementary school, and since we didn’t have cable one of the few shows that was on TV was Gilmore Girls so I developed a big crush on Rory. Before that, I was probably a bit too young for it to be a real “crush” but I was enamored by The Childlike Empress in Neverending Story.

First job you had? First time you got fired?

Mica: My first job after moving to LA was at a weird yoga festival/wellness content farm/publication thing. Very strange, very LA. All I did was make powerpoints about yogurt milk and organic massage oils for our brand partners. I got laid off one day. I think almost everyone in the content division ended up getting laid off but I was one of the first to go. My powerpoints were not crucial to the survival of the company I guess????????????

First car you owned?

Matt: A teal blue Dodge Magnum. I would drive our high school band to our gigs in that and the trunk was big enough to fit most of our gear. One day I drove it through a huge puddle in the middle of Biscayne Blvd. during a rainstorm and flooded the engine. Mica and I were stuck in it for around three hours until we got towed.

First time you performed in public?

Matt: My fifth grade talent show, I played [Ozzy Osbourne’s] “Crazy Train” on the guitar, no accompaniment. I dropped my pick halfway through and had to stop to pick it up.

Mica: Just want to chime in and say that my first public singing performance was also “Crazy Train.” Except I was shaking so much I’m not 100% sure I made any audible sounds.

First bad review?

Mica: We used to use SubmitHub a lot when we first started Magdalena Bay, so rather than one first bad review it was like a barrage of rejection every time we submitted a new song. Fun times.

www.imaginaldisk.world

[Note: This article originally appeared in Issue 74 of our print magazine, which is out now. This is its debut online.]

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