miaw – Walmart
miaw have shared “Walmart”, their first release with untitled (recs) as part of the label’s “(zero)” series, an open format built around short, spontaneous collaborations rather than full rollouts. It’s a good fit for a duo that’s been moving fast since their 2024 EP My Petswan put them on the map.
The track opens on monolithic synths that cut in and out on alternating beats before tumbling breakbeats take over a few seconds in. Liza Dries’ vocal cuts through the glitchy first half with a clarity that doesn’t quite match the chaos underneath it. Then the whole thing shifts into looser, chirpier dream-pop territory for the back half, with Frederik Fog’s voice arriving as little more than a whisper right at the end. It moves through more ideas in three minutes than most songs attempt in five, never quite settling on one texture before swapping it for another.
Dries and Fog met in Cologne at an Alex G show, started writing together almost on a whim years later, and have been splitting time between solo work and the Copenhagen scene since. They’ve talked candidly about how hard it’s been translating their layered, Ableton-built tracks into something that feels live rather than like playing along to a backing track. Recently, they added a third member, producer Emil F. Emborg, to help pull that off. “We want to have the feeling that we are playing the music,” Fog has said. Dries has pointed to a wide, scattered set of reference points, ambient, trip-hop, the more intentional end of art-rock. He noted that despite often listening to darker music themselves, what comes out of the two of them tends to land brighter than expected.
“Walmart” backs that up. It’s a genuinely strange, busy track, and it works because none of its competing parts ever cancel each other out.
