Los Angeles-based electro indie-pop duo Magdalena Bay—a.k.a. Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin—announce their long-awaited debut album. Entirely written, produced, performed, mixed and mastered by Magdalena Bay, Mercurial World will be released on October 8 via Luminelle. This album comes as a follow-up to their latest EP, A Little Rhythm and a Wicked Feeling, which was released on North America’s COVID-19 Eve, March 13, 2020. With their sold-out tours with Kero Kero Bonito and Yumi Zouma canceled, Magdalena Bay found a way to do the impossible: thrive in isolation, transcend the endless doom scroll, and capture people’s attention while they were stuck indoors. Over the past 18 months, the band used social platforms to organically build a dedicated following and dispatch their music in hypnotic, ephemeral bursts that met the moment. “We spend all of our time together, and in some ways Mercurial World is about that particular sense of madness in containment,” Lewin says. “We live together and make art together; this immerses you in our creative, insular universe.” The result is Mercurial World, a ridiculously good and otherworldly project that is as much musical as it is an experiment in pop persona and visual aesthetics.

Pre-order Mercurial World, out October 8 via Luminelle, HERE

To celebrate the announcement of Mercurial World, Magdalena Bay share the album’s first single “Chaeri” alongside its music video. “Chaeri muses on mental health, friendship, loneliness and control. It’s about the walls we put up and the walls we should tear down for the sake of authentic connection, and Mica’s own personal difficulties with that,” the band explains of the track that finds Mica pleading for forgiveness while a soundscape so vast and thunderous threatens to consume her. “We tried taking these themes and elevating them to build a big, dark world with unsettling undertones.” The accompanying video is a new frontier for Magdalena Bay, with cinematic visuals that retain the surreal mood and VHS-obsessed nature of their DIY videos to date. From cult brochures mailed to unsuspecting fans and an immersive y2k-inspired website, to easter-eggs scattered throughout videos, Magdalena Bay has engineered a rich visual world surrounding their debut album and this music video welcomes you to it.

Photo Courtesy: Lissyelle Laricchia