Two years ago, when I interviewed Magdalena Bay before the release of Imaginal Disk, the band talked about how it felt to listen to their favorite records from when they were teenagers. With time on their hands while touring their debut, Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin decided to revisit their old high school classics — Radiohead, The Beatles, Fiona Apple, St. Vincent, et cetera. “They say the music you discover when you’re 13 or 14 is the music you’ll always think of as the peak,” Lewin said. “I feel like when teenagers listen to music, they really like—.” Tenenbaum finishes the sentence: “They really really feel it. I’m so jealous. I want that again.” 

Since its release in 2024, Magdalena Bay’s second album Imaginal Disk has given many, many fans — teenaged or otherwise — the same feeling the band had when revisiting their own adolescent favorites. Imaginal Disk is a music-nerd instant classic, inspiring intricate theories around its loose narrative and legions of fans to dress up to their concerts as True, the album’s protagonist. Imaginal Disk is arguably the biggest cult hit of this decade. You just can’t help but get swallowed up in its world. And as of last night, Imaginal Disk’s world got even larger. 

After years of teasing at its existence, the duo premiered the album’s accompanying film to a sold-out room at New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival. The film weaves together the already-released music videos to singles “Death and Romance,” “Image,” and “That’s My Floor” into a psychedelic playground of green screen VFX, puppetry, and elaborate costuming. It’s a visual accompaniment to the record, essentially an hour-long music video that’s equal parts Yellow Submarine, I Saw the TV Glow, and Flash Gordon. 

That teenaged, passionate embrace of Imaginal Disk was echoed by the film’s director, Amanda Kramer. “The music is iconic. To me, it feels like a classic album,” Kramer told me during an interview on the red carpet. “To be able to just be inside the visuals of the music and be listening to the music is such an actually pleasant experience. When you make music videos and you have to hear the song over and over and over again… please. But I could live in that music, and it was wonderful.” 

Though Mica encouraged fans to sing along and dance, the premiere’s crowd – many of whom were dressed up in full True Blue makeup and costume – was quiet and well-behaved. These are music nerds, after all.

Following the screening, the band and Kramer answered questions from Casey Baron, Tribeca Fest’s senior programmer of film and games. To top it off, Matt and Mica performed stripped-down renditions of “Angel on a Satellite” and “Cry For Me.” 

Any fans expecting clarity to the album’s “plot” will likely have more questions than answers. The film isn’t meant to establish an obvious Imaginal Disk throughline. It’s an exploration of the album’s universe. It begins with a VFX gorilla receiving a CD-ROM disc implanted in its head, perhaps a reference to the opening sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. From there, we follow Mica, playing True, as she traverses through a colorful, strange, Fantasia-esque world full  of evil doctors and winged eyeballs.

Like the album, the film finds the midpoint between silly and sinister, each scene both playful and uncanny. In the film, there’s plenty of TV-watching, campy choreography, and Matt reappearing to play as many instruments as possible. 

Thankfully, the film doesn’t try to prescribe an obvious answer to  the many interpretations of their record. "We get asked about Imaginal Disk as a ‘concept album.’ The thing is, the album itself does exist without this movie, of course," Tenenbaum tells Baron in the Q&A. "There is a sort of intrinsic narrative to the lyrics about an exploration of self, etc. We’ve found a way to describe it where this film – this narrative – gets overlaid on top of that. It’s an option for an interpretation of it, or a story that could come out of the lyrics. It’s not the only interpretation." 

“There are concept albums where it’s like, you basically have the script within the lyrics,” Lewin adds. “But I think this album is not like that. And the film is just a way to interpret the more open-ended lyrics and overlay characters and plot in a way that’s not necessarily intrinsic to the music itself.” 

Though it might not qualify as a plotty, storyline-driven concept album in the traditional sense of the term, Magdalena Bay had concepts for the Imaginal Disk film early on. “Maybe after the first few songs, we started having visual ideas for [the movie],” Lewin told me in an interview before the screening. “It was actually something we wanted to do with our previous record. We were like, ‘Oh, it’d be cool to do some sort of full visual thing.’ Never ended up working out. So we were like, ‘Okay, let’s try to conceptualize this from earlier on in the process, while we were still writing and try and see if we can make it happen.”  

“95% of it was the music fueling the visuals. But in some cases, because we were thinking of the visuals, there were little things we were seeing in our mind’s eye that made it into the words or into the music. Like a rain sound effect, for example, or certain lines,” Mica added. 

By the time they met with Kramer, those concepts turned into a full dossier: “When I met them, they came, brought their dog… And then they took the dossier out,” Kramer told the audience during the Q&A. “And I think the dossier was like 90 pages. And there were pictures, and lines, and graphs. I was like, okay I’m in over my head but I’m in. It was just craziness from the beginning, but the kind of craziness that you welcome as an artist.” 

After 160-or-so tour dates in support of the record, the premiere at Tribeca was the perfect capstone for an album that makes its listeners feel like teenagers again. Even as the crew heard the album relentlessly while filming, no one could really get over Imaginal Disk: “We were singing every song, I mean, everyone on the crew,” Kramer recalled. “Everyone singing every song every day, and just getting excited for the next song that would come, and feeling the music song-by-song. It’s an instant classic, I think.”

Watch our red carpet interview with Matt and Mica below: