With their debut album out later this week, Los Angeles duo Magdalena Bay share one more teaser, “Hysterical Us,” a psychedelic single that muses on the anxieties and questions spurned from existential thinking. With an inventive and colorful music video, the electric indie duo takes sleepless nights and drapes the darkness with out of the box aesthetics and captivating imagery.
While the lyrics seek answers to questions with no provable or definitive truths — such as the reason for life, whether or not we’re alone in the universe and how the hell did we even learn to breathe in the first place — “Hysterical Us” pulsates with an upbeat energy and psychedelic soulfulness. With fleeting bursts of electronic sounds and a grooving melody, Magdalena Bay take you on a fully immersive trip, providing a little light in the absence of surety.
As the band take you on a musical exploration, they pair “Hysterical Us” with a colorful, psychedelic and fun music video. From dancing with a gaggle of jumpsuited individuals in trippy masks, traveling down the road in a mind-bending van (think Hippie bus from the 60s) to floating in a conscious-altering pool, the band deconstruct all the unanswerable questions we ask ourselves to reveal how silly it is to think we could even approach satisfactory answers. Instead of give into the angst, they explore it calmly and let the otherworldly experience ensue, accepting at the end that the world is a weird place, and we may never know why or how to find the ultimate meaning of mankind.
“We loved being able to interpret all these heavy questions through the colorful world of MILAGROS Collective,” notes the band.
Although the pandemic caused the band to delay and cancel tour dates in 2020, they took that time to build an organic following via social media platforms to more grassroots tactics, such as mailing brochures to unsuspecting fans, creating an immersive y2k-inspired band website and planting easter-eggs scattered throughout videos.
Written, produced, performed, mixed and mastered entirely by Magdalena Bay — their debut album, Mercurial World, drops Oct. 8 via via Luminelle. Like their most recent single, band members Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin explore in their new album, abstract and existential life questions with themes of death, destiny and doing the impossible laced throughout. First making music together in high school, then again after reconnecting after college, Tenenbaum and Lewin share a love for prog rock and love to experiment and push the boundaries of what pop music is and sounds like.
In addition to releasing their new album this Friday, Magdalena Bay are set to play that same night (Oct. 8) in Los Angeles at El Cid. They will also be supporting George Clanton, playing again in L.A. on Nov. 11 at the 1720 venue in downtown with additional dates in San Diego on Nov. 2 at the Soca Bar and in Berkeley at the Cornerstone on Nov. 10.
Words: Patti Sanchez
For more on Magdalena Bay, make sure to visit their website and follow them on Instagram and Twitter.
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