Ciao Malz Is Feeling Safe, Then Sorry Featured
- Written by Marky Edison
Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist Ciao Malz (Malia DelaCruz) has announced her debut EP, Safe Then Sorry, to be released via Audio Antihero Records (Frog / Magana / Nosferatu D2 / Cloud) on December 6. It will be preceded by the free/pay-what-you-want ‘Two Feet Tall’ single this Friday. Her music first reached the Audio Antihero label when she issued a cover of Frog’s ‘You Know I’m Down’ sleeper hit in 2023, and the label then offered to work with her on this debut.
Inspired by artists like Elliot Smith, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Men I Trust, she combines witty introspection, informed by her experience as a young woman of color, with a layered musical bounce. While her self-released demos earned supporters at NPR: WFUV, Loud Women, and others, this is her most mature, eclectic, and complete work to date.
Safe Then Sorry ranges from the breakneck indie rock frustration of ‘Two Feet Tall’ (“Drinking all the milk and missing all the three-pointers / Think about it still, find new ways to disappoint her”) to alt. country on ‘Bad for the Bad Guy’ (“I feel like Mary Shelley in 1818 / Getting bored and do something extraordinary / Strike the pen to the paper, making sense of it later”) and aching folk pop for ‘Take Me Out of Here’, (“Occasionally my patience leaves the room / Here comes that busted attitude / That I can’t stand how the sky’s blue / But what I would do, to give it to you”) and ‘Gold Rush’ (“Got no temptation, to sit around have the same conversation / Going in circles, going berserk / There’s nothing that I have not heard”).
