Los Angeles-based electro indie-pop duo Magdalena Bay—a.k.a. Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin—will release their long-awaited debut later this week. One of the most irresistible, refreshing and exciting pop records you’ll hear this year, Mercurial World was entirely written, produced, performed, mixed and mastered by Magdalena Bay. It’s the 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. As the duo have always been Extremely Online, they were uniquely primed to meet the moment, and used social platforms to organically build a dedicated following and dispatch their music in hypnotic, ephemeral bursts. 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. The result is the ridiculously good and otherworldly Mercurial World, and Magdalena Bay invites you to join them in it. 

Ahead of this week’s album release, Magdalena Bay share one last preview of the record in the form of “Hysterical Us.””’Hysterical Us’ is about our anxieties, paranoias and existential musings,” the band explains. Of the video, which was made in New Orleans, the band continues, “We loved being able to interpret all these heavy questions through the colorful world of MILAGROS Collective.”

Photo Courtesy: Ian Clontz