Los Angeles-based electro indie-pop duo Magdalena Bay—a.k.a. Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin—recently announced their long-awaited debut album, and now have shared a new song and video off of the forthcoming record. Following the first single “Chaeri” is the funky, bass-heavy “Secrets (Your Fire),” which tips its hat to the 90s. Where the music video accompanying “Chaeri” showcased a new frontier for Magdalena Bay, with cinematic visuals that retain the surreal mood and VHS-obsessed nature of their DIY videos to date, the video for “Secrets (Your Fire) seamlessly blends the two worlds. “Secrets is about interconnectivity, privacy, and digital anxiety,” the band explains. “It’s also about a need to keep sharing, to keep giving up more and more of yourself to faceless strangers in the hopes of making friends or fans.”

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. 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. 

Photo Courtesy: Lissyelle Laricchia