CIAO MALZ
Always Be My Maybe

pop folk / indie folk / bedroom pop / singer-songwriter / folk / pop / indie / indie pop

CIAO MALZ (Malia DelaCruz) grew up in Connecticut, listening to her dad’s mixtapes of Oasis, the Eagles, and Dave Matthews Band. She started making music when she was given a white MacBook — spending all her free time on GarageBand and filling the hard drive with hours of guitar tracks and unintelligible vocal melodies. She’s always loved experimenting with audio, even secretly recording history class lectures and turning them into songs to share with her friends.

After moving to New York for college in 2014, Malia stumbled upon a listing for a music studio when she was looking for a studio apartment. Here, she began collaborating with local artists like Hannah Pruzinsky, Ceci Sturman, and James Chrisman of Brooklyn’s Sister. trio. She fell in love with writing, experimenting, performing and collaborating in her Lower East Side studio space, and has continued to make music there ever since.

Over time, Malia began to share her own material, and in 2020, she played her first live show as CIAO MALZ, backed by a lineup of college friends. She began to self-release a series of singles in 2021, which found fans at NPR: WFUV and the Loud Women new music site, among others.

In 2023, she began to play bass on live shows for Sister., and issued a cover of Frog’s “You Know I’m Down,” which introduced her to the Audio Antihero record label, through whom CIAO MALZ will be releasing her ‘Safe Then Sorry’ EP on December 6th 2024.

If you had an EP, CIAO MALZ would listen.