As a teenager in Oak Park, Mia Joy Rocha visited the library to learn about music. “I didn’t have the Internet growing up, so I had to go to the library all the time to rent CDs to rip,” she says. Throughout the mid-2000s, Rocha would check out 20 CDs at a time, immersing herself in genres that had emerged long before she was born—Krautrock via Neu!, for example, and ambient in the works of Brian Eno. She studied Björk looking for ways to help her own voice reach the same transcendent extremes.
Powerhouse Brooklyn indie label Fire Talk announced in January that it had signed Rocha, making her the fifth Chicago act on its present roster (alongside Fran, Deeper, Dehd, and Accessory, a solo project of Dehd guitarist Jason Balla). The label has been on a terrific run lately, thanks in part to Chicago bands—Deeper’s Auto-Pain and Dehd’s Flower of Devotion were among 2020’s most celebrated indie-rock records.
Her grandmother’s love of music touched everyone in the family in different ways. “The joke is that she was a beautiful singer, and it skipped a generation, ’cause my dad is not. But it went to me,” Rocha says. Her father is a veteran guitarist on the city’s blues open-mike circuit—she says he was still gigging around town when the pandemic struck. Her older brother is a metalhead who introduced her to electronic music and alt-rock when she was a kid.
“I thought I wanted to be a painter, I thought I wanted to be a music critic, but it turns out I’m pretty good at ceramics,” Rocha says. “I love art—I think I need to be creating something or else I’ll go crazy. I kind of wanted to keep music as a passion and not something I was graded on.”
Mac and Rocha bonded over music—both what they were making and what they were listening to—in order to jump-start their friendship. “I definitely got to know her taste super well from living together,” Mac says. “Which I think was really valuable in making Mia’s record.”
“I would always go to him for industry questions, or I’d vent to him about industry stuff,” Rocha says. “He’s a good soundboard and just the kindest dude.”
