January 18, 2026

Happy 2026 folks! I hope this year hasn’t been treating you too roughly so far. I’m slowly working on some of my 2025 favorites lists, so I’ve been in a bit of a reviewing mood! Before I finish up my favorite albums of 2025 post, though, I’ve been dying to write a few thoughts about one of 2024’s albums I fell in love with last year.

Imaginal Disk by Magdalena Bay is one of my favorite albums that I’ve listened to in recent memory. It has a really unique style, great lyrics, and a super interesting marketing cycle that usurped a lot of my attention towards the end of last year.

Imaginal Disk, Time, and ARGs

One of the triumphs of this album is its relationship to time, both musically and lyrically. Though this album’s concept follows a fictional character, it feels similar to albums like The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner by Ben Folds, where a lot of the themes and character beats in the album run parallel to the artist’s lives. In this case, this album is lyrically framed in a really unique way where the opening track looks back on the duo’s family history, and the final track comes off as a triumphant look to the future.

This unique lyrical framing fits so nicely with the sound of the album, as it balances electronic pop elements that feel very contemporary with glitchy sounds and deep soundscapes that feel ripe from the late 90s or early 2000s. Its sound is simultaneously timeless, dated, and modern, which blends with the concept in a really special way. I really enjoy that this album covers a lot of ground thematically, and it uses a shifting sound palette to achieve something consistently-changing, yet coherent.

As if the timeless elements in the music weren’t cool enough, this album pulls me in further by having an alternate reality game, or ARG, with an early internet aesthetic related to it. Though this may be out of the scope of this review, the ARG available on their website featuring web art, references to their lyrics, and additional original story elements gives this entire album cycle a timeless texture. To be clear, I did listen to and love this album before I knew the ARG existed; however, ARGs will always be a quick way to make me fall in love with a project.

Though these are somewhat unrelated to the songs individually, the album’s relationship to time, the ARG, and other elements like music videos inform each other reveal more about the themes and story of this album. Each one of those points could almost be an entire post in and of themselves, but for now, I just wanted to focus on some of the individual tracks from this album. These are some truly unique songs that I’m really excited to discuss!

She Looked Like Me!

It may be cliche, but I think there is something to be said about the importance of a great opening track, and “She Looked Like Me!” is a particularly wonderful way to start an album. This song immediately hooked me with its Vespertine-esque microbeats and light vocals, but the way it transforms, rises, and falls throughout its tight runtime is mesmerizing. Genuinely, I was shocked in the best way the first time I heard the horns that come in around a minute in. And then my jaw was on the floor with the following verse and it proceeded to be there for the rest of the song.

If I was to distill what I truly love about this song, I think it would be its flexibility. Jumping between all these different sounds and ideas fits perfectly with its hypermedia aesthetic with has hooks that blow most contemporary pop tracks out of the water. It starts with a beautiful, whispery introduction before exploding into several interesting verses that ultimately implode back to where it begins. Treading this much ground in a three minute song is really impressive, and that’s not even touching on the song’s introspective lyrics that set the stage for the album’s central character, True.

Even if the rest of the album was middling, I’d still praise it for this opening alone. Luckily, though, this is just one of many highlights!

True Blue Interlude

“Say hello, it’s you. The purest you. The next stage, the next phase is here.”

Jumping ahead, “True Blue Interlude” separates the solid “Killing Time” and “Image” and ultimately stands on its own as another one of this album’s best. Once again, the lyrics blend with a Frutiger-aero soundscape in such a calming way. It really sounds like something from a 90s or 2000s ad in a nostalgic, dreamy way. Despite its brief runtime, it still has as much personality as any other song on Imaginal Disk and compliments the first half of the album.

Death & Romance + Fear, Sex

A lot of reviews or lists will highlight one of these two tracks as the album’s best, and I don’t necessarily disagree. I mention them together because they feel complimentary; “Death & Romance” is an upbeat, grooving song that asks heady questions about purpose, while “Fear, Sex” follows-up with an answer about worries of being alone. These songs are both produced in a magical way.

If you are going to listen to any of these songs to get the vibe of this album, I can’t recommend these two enough. They distill a lot of the ideas found throughout the entire work into two dreamy songs that haven’t left my mind since I first heard them. And truly, “Death & Romance” may be one of the best pop songs I’ve heard in a while.

Vampire in the Corner

Like a lot of the songs on this album, “Vampire in the Corner” builds up to a huge sound, but this time its for a tender, nearly-creepy song about a “vampire,” or an inconsistent relationship. Again, this song’s hook is such an ear worm with a hypnotic chorus.

That’s My Floor

This is an interesting, groovy track that I mainly wanted to mention because of its flow. Call me crazy, but the initial flow reminded me a lot of the flow in “The Love Song” from Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared. Not a bad thing, but I just found that really funny and I have it stuck in my head all the time because of it. But again, this is a wonderful track!

The Ballad of Matt & Mica

The final track of the album, and another one of its best! As I mentioned briefly before, this track is an interpolation of “She Looked Like Me!” that focuses on the duo’s present life and their future. It’s the most triumphant song on the album to me, which is interesting because I’ve read some reviews that mention this song is disconcerting. While that sounds like conflicting vibes, I can kind of see it simply because of the scope of this song. This has a lot in common with “She Looked Like Me!” in the sense that it has a lot of shifts and covers a lot of ground, and I can see its contrast in sound to the rest of the album coming off as overly-enthusiastic.

I really enjoy this great closer. It sounds like a culmination of a lot of the sounds and themes covered in this album and features some of the best production on offer.

A Happy Ending

So, yeah, I love this album. It’s so colorful and joyous despite asking some troubling questions about modern life, and I LOVE art that has contradictions like that. I think the aesthetic is great, the lyrics are great, the hooks are great, truly, it’s all special.

Please, give this a listen if you haven’t yet! I think another strength this album carries is its accessibility, since a pop album with a lot of different ideas will likely have something for everyone. And if you enjoyed reading a lot of my gushing about an album, please stay tuned for my favorite albums of 2025 list that will be releasing very soon!

Plus: if you’re into manga or anime, you can hear a lot more of my thoughts on the podcast I co-host, Monkey D. Luffy vs. the World! Recent episodes include Hunter X Hunter’s first arc and the beginning of One Piece’s Albasta Saga!