Pumpkin Spice MGNA Crrrta
MGNA Crrrta is making the most exciting music of the post-hyperpop era
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We made plans to meet in the park, but it was raining so I suggested we go to Starbucks. I usually prefer to #SupportSmallBusinesses but there was something apt about the venue for my interview with MGNA Crrrta (pronounced Magna Carta), a brand-new pop duo composed of Ginger and Farheen, two nineteen year-old creatives based in downtown Manhattan.
Starbucks has all the markings of Americana trash: overpriced, deeply unethical, surprisingly delicious, and completely and terrifying sterile. It gives one the same in-between feeling as MGNA Crrrta’s aesthetic, which I would deem loosely as Americana Landfill. Almost all of their album art or intently executed photo shoots feature the duo posing in front of some liminal, industrial locale with their faces hidden or partially veiled. The photos reminds me of a polaroid or scrap you find dirtied on the street but decide take home because you find the image oddly compelling. There’s often beauty in the garbage.
As we walked into the Starbucks, Farheen smiled: “Let’s get a PSL.” I had totally forgotten the acronym for Pumpkin Spice Latte. It seemed like a good idea though so I got mine tall with oat. It was 7 dollars and tasted like decadent pumpkin chemistry. Even trash in America is chicly expensive.
I first heard MGNA Crrrta through my Spotify Discover Weekly playlist. The song was “Girl Party” and I was so taken by the song’s addicting chaos and by the duo’s low-key mystery that I did something very rare for a Spotify user: I became a true and genuine fan via an algorithmic rec.
“Girl Party” harkens back to the digital rave of Crystal Castles or early Grimes, but it has an undeniable novelty. It’s not defined so much by a progression, then it is a sense of architecture. There’s barely a verse, chorus, or even expansion. Once the song begins, you’re inside it. Pulsing synth chords blanket the beat. The drums are buried under a wash of noise. And the vocals, autotuned, simple and barely audible, still project an earnest sweetness. You can feel them floating in the small shared space.
I reached out to MGNA Crrrta, not just because I want to put more people on to their music, but because I believe they represent the chapter that comes after hyperpop. Hyperpop has, in recent years, grown stale and self-parodying. The queer ecstasy of SOPHIE and PC music felt rooted in ethereal overwhelm; if that music sounded “crazy,” it’s because it was buckling under the lofty weight of all that it carried. 100 Gecs, on the other hand, felt crazy in the sense that they’re a bull in a china shop slipping on banana peels and landing on whoopee cushions. Gecs has defined the predominant and current wave of hyperpop, and in their wake we have legions of other artists who take thrill in making some form meme-music, in the deep-fried stuff of the internet brain. But MGNA Crrrta feels more like a return to form, back to the ecstasy of SOPHIE, but for a younger, even more-online generation.
“[Our music] is a melting pot of everything good,” Farheen told me. “Like you have your hyperpop influences like SOPHIE, and then you have Crystal Castles and then you have Kesha, which is like pop, fun girl-music. That’s just us.”
When I asked if they considered themselves part of the hyperpop scene, Ginger confirmed my hunch that they’re doing something different. “We do categorize ourselves within hyperpop to some extent, but we don’t fit in the bounds of it at the same time. We’re inspired by a lot of the same stuff that hyperpop is inspired by, but we go in sort of a different direction with it.”
I agree. If so much of hyperpop today is winking at its listeners, then MGNA Crrrta has their eyes closed, moshing.
Ginger is from rural New Jersey and Farheen is from Seattle, but they met and became best friends when they were 11 in a (and this is real) Hunger Games Roleplay Minecraft Server. For the uninitiated, that means a server on the online world-building game Minecraft that was specifically dedicated to the role playing of The Hunger Games’s world of teen violence spectacle.
“It wasn’t even just survival games on Minecraft,” Ginger explained. “It was like real role-playing. Every Saturday we would have these hours-long re-enactments of the Hunger Games. We would log on, create our characters and go through the whole process. We would role play dying and shit.”
Farheen interjected, “It was emotional.”
Over the years, they played the game, developed shared beefs with the same online enemies and bonded, eventually seeing each other’s online profiles and becoming best friends via facetime. They didn’t even meet IRL until the November of 2020 (which Ginger made sure to add is “low key controversial”), when Ginger was visiting Seattle to see a very sick relative. Given the rare opportunity to be physically close to each other, they decided to finally link. The online bond translated seamlessly to the complicated world of reality.
While the story of their online meeting somewhat amazed me, it also made perfect sense. They formed their friendship in a space of world building and fantasy. This helps explain the specificity and immersion of the MGNA Crrrta project, and why their work feels so much more expansive than so many other new music projects I encounter today. MGNA Crrrta is still building worlds
When they both moved to New York and decided to start a band, all of it unfurled naturally. Ginger produces. They both write the songs. They both work tirelessly to make sure it’s cool and singular and never contrived.
“We don’t come from families that are connected in the industry at all,” Ginger shared. “We’ve worked so hard for our music presence.”
They both loathe the nepotism that defines so much of the industry, as well as the over-eagerness of many young “better connected” artists to brand themselves in clearly legible terms. MGNA Crrrta doesn’t need to be relatable. They just need to be felt.
Their approach is already paying off. The duo just played their first out-of-NYC show at a formidable rave in Los Angeles. They were flown out. They met fans.
Farheen described the experience. “It did not feel real. Growing up, trips were a big deal. The fact that I was getting on a plane from my own work was crazy.” She continued, “It’s really important for us that we don’t stop. We’re the most omnipresent girls.”
They just put out their first video for the pop ode “Right.” It’s a highly impressive production featuring the two as glamorous yet starved vampires performing on the screen of a shlubby dude’s TV. They sing, “ I know how to do you right, right, right,” the last word repeating like an unstoppable glitch. Towards the end of the video, the song abruptly stops and we find ourselves in a stock-footage informercial for “Rite” water. A soothing voice-over shares the benefits of the product over pristine images of white picket suburbia. “It feels so wrong but it tastes so . . .” and then we return to the chorus, “Right, right, right,” as Ginger and Farheen mosh in some liminal dystopia.
Today, they’re releasing their new single, “$ome Drugzzz,” which they describe as “pure parody.” The track centers around a largely atonal baseline and melody. The vocals are pitched up, squealey and side-chained to near oblivion. Everything scatters atop a glitched-out jungle beat until finally Ginger’s voice comes in clearly, sounding off with a certain sloppy attitude: “You must think I’m addicted to some drugs/ That I’m snorting up your dumb love.”
It feels and tastes good even if it hits you with a sticky-sweet sugar rush. Two pumps of pumpkin spice syrup go right into my oat milk latte. I prance around the room and feel fancy, like an American icon. It’s a big, weird world and we get to build it. If only we can survive the Hunger Games.
Follow MGNA Crrrta on Instagram and listen to their latest track, “$ome Drugzzz” streaming now.