Pop as Philosophy
Mercurial World is the record that confirmed Magdalena Bay as one of the more interesting things happening in American pop. Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin — who write, produce, and perform everything — had been releasing music for a few years before this, building an audience that was passionate in inverse proportion to its size, and the album announced what all that previous work was leading toward: a fully realized pop universe that operates with philosophical ambition dressed in the most pleasurable clothes.
The pop here is real pop — hooks, production polish, the sonic language of contemporary radio. But underneath it, or running through it, there's a set of ideas about simulation and reality, about the self as performance, about what it means to be a person in a mediated world. These ideas don't drag the music down into concept-album heaviness. They generate the music's subject matter and then the music does what music does, which is transform ideas into feeling.
The production is a major part of the achievement. It pulls from the full history of synthetic pop — from '80s dream pop through '90s electronic, from early 2000s Y2K aesthetics through contemporary hyperpop — and synthesizes it into something that sounds current without being transparently trend-following. It's an expensive-sounding record made with visible craft.
The Thinking Too Much Problem
I say 'people who think too much' as something close to a compliment. There's a specific listener who has always felt slightly out of place with pop music — who loves the form, the pleasure of the hook, the physical response to a good chorus — but who needs something more in the content, some texture of idea or strangeness that gives the intelligence somewhere to go.
Magdalena Bay is the band for this listener and has been for a while, but Mercurial World makes the case most fully. The lyrics on this record reward the kind of attention most pop lyrics don't invite. There are lines here that function as aphorisms, as questions, as compressed philosophical statements, and they're delivered with Tenenbaum's voice in exactly the popstar register that makes them land in the pleasure center before the analytical mind catches up.
'Prophecy' is the track that gets name-dropped most often and deserves it — the hook is as good a hook as I heard that year, and the ideas in the verses don't compromise it. But the album track 'Dreaming of Diamond Days' is where the emotional intelligence of the project becomes clearest: a piece about longing and impermanence that doesn't overstate its case, that trusts the music to carry what the words gesture toward.
What Comes Next
I'm writing this in early 2022, which means Mercurial World has been out long enough to have settled into my listening life but early enough that I don't know what Magdalena Bay is going to do next. The ambition of this record suggests they have a lot more to say, and the reception it received — critical enthusiasm, an audience that grew into something significant — gives them the platform to say it.
The pop universe they've built is particular enough to be worth defending, weird enough to stay interesting, accessible enough to keep growing.
I'll be in it when the next thing comes. I'm already wondering what it will be.
I think about the listener Magdalena Bay makes music for and I recognize myself, which is either evidence that the music is doing something genuinely universal or evidence that my taste has been confirmed by a very specific piece of popular culture. Both are possible. The feeling of recognition is the same regardless of cause.
Mercurial World has been in my listening life long enough to have become part of the furniture — the music I return to when I need something that provides both pleasure and the sensation of thinking, something that doesn't require choosing between enjoyment and attention. That's rarer than it should be and I keep being grateful for it.
