The prog-rock origins of Magdalena Bay: “No one’s listening”
Normally, the premise of being in a progressive rock band is to take things as far as they can possibly be stretched, testing just how malleable the parameters of rock music can be.
This is a large part of the reason why prog bands seem to last forever, because they’re striving to make good on their promise, and if you see a bunch of 70-year-olds still rocking out and playing 20-minute epic songs, they’ve probably all been doing it for the best part of 50 years, at the very least.
Despite this, prog rock has come and gone out of fashion over time, and you have to wonder if a band like King Crimson or Yes came out in the early 2010s, would they have gotten off the ground in the same way as they did when emerging in the late ‘60s and ‘70s? They’d have had room to exist, sure, but there may not have been the same audience there to receive their work and help them rise to popularity in quite the same way, and the fact that their later records from this period have never been as well-received is an indicator of this.
Some prog bands have emerged in recent years, with acts like Black Midi and Maruja flying the flag for progressive music in the current decade, even if the former have now seemingly dissolved. However, for one band, they arrived slightly too early to be noticed for their efforts in this area, so much so that they disbanded and changed tack, ultimately for the better of their musical endeavours.
Magdalena Bay are slowly becoming one of the world’s most beloved art pop acts, with the Floridian duo of Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin making forward-thinking synth-led pop tunes that have captured the hearts of the younger generations. Yes, it’s a little wacky at times, and seems to be the sort of act ripe for notoriety in the digital age, but there’s something undoubtedly contagious about their work that can’t be denied.
However, had they stuck to their roots and continued with their first project, things could have been a different story altogether. Their first band, Tabula Rasa, existed from 2011 to 2016, with the two members still being in their teens when it began, and was very proggy in nature, taking cues from the likes of Rush and Genesis. It’s hardly something that captured the attention of audiences far and wide, and while arguably heavier than what the duo are doing now, you can hear aspects of what has become the Magdalena Bay sound now.
The two had even been in a classic rock covers band prior to that when they were both involved in a music programme at high school, but when they began collaborating on their own music, it began to take shape as a much more prog-leaning project, which they were ultimately proud of but disappointed in how it never went anywhere over the course of two albums.
Lewin opened up about how Tabula Rasa came to an end in an interview with The Line of Best Fit shortly before the release of their 2024 album, Imaginal Disk, and said that Magdalena Bay had to form to continue a musical partnership. “We went to college and that whole band sort of got spread out across the country, so we stopped,” he explained. “We wanted to continue to make music together, because we felt like we had a good musical partnership from that band, and we came up with Magdalena Bay.”
Tenenbaum would also comment on their origins in another interview while promoting the record. “It was like, ‘No one’s listening to our prog music, what a shame,’” the singer and keyboard player joked. “We were excited to try something different. So we got into the mechanics of ‘what does it mean to write a pop song?’ and ‘what is this craft?’”
Admittedly, there are still prog flavours to what they do, but they’ve managed to create a version of pop music that stretches beyond its usual parameters, instead of continuing to create Phish-inspired tracks like ‘Crimson’. They’re probably better off where they are now, although I also wouldn’t say no to them sticking a 20-minute opus on their next album.
