Mialuna drops brand new single “Snow”

Music has never followed a straight line for the Norwegian singer-songwriter Miriam Kjølen, an artist who’s spent more than a decade as one half of Mhoo, alongside Oda Dahl, performing more than 1,000 shows across Europe, the USA, Russia and Brazil. The experience brought constant movement, festival stages, television appearances and performances alongside artists including Jeff Beck, First Aid Kit, Jethro Tull and Lissie. Then, abruptly, the noise stopped.

What followed was not an abandonment of music, but a period of quiet and over eight years, breakups, loss, studies, the birth of twins, the pandemic and a move to island life gradually shifted the focus of Miriam’s life. Songs continued to form somewhere in the background, slowly taking shape without pressure or a defined destination and now, from that extended pause, she’s emerged as something of a recalibration under the moniker Mialuna.

Her new solo project occupies a spacious musical landscape she describes as orchestral Nordicana, where piano, strings and choir form the framework, creating an expansive sound where delicate songwriting matters as much as scale. There are echoes of artists such as Ane Brun, Damien Rice and Ray LaMontagne, but Mialuna’s music also leaves room for silence and atmosphere to become part of the composition. Mialuna’s first chapter began in March with “Does My Heart Even Know,” followed in May by “I Never Meant To Let You Down,” with both singles receiving radio play from NRK in Norway to Plains FM in New Zealand, while Amazing Radio UK’s Charlie Ashcroft dubbed Miriam as a “wonderful songwriting talent.”

Now comes her brand new third single titled “Snow,” released via the Casey Recordings imprint on World Suicide Prevention Day. It’s perhaps the clearest expression thus far of what sits beneath the Mialuna project, arriving as a song that Miriam penned ten years ago, shortly after losing a close family member to suicide. A decade later, the song has changed alongside her understanding of grief, becoming something larger than the circumstances that first inspired it.

Ultimately, it’s an attempt to preserve a whole life rather than allow its final chapter to define it, with Miriam’s intimate and distinctive voice moving through yearning piano, atmospheric lap steel and trumpet, while gentle, Sigur Rós-like drums provide a gentle energy beneath a choir of ten singers. Terje Johannesen contributes the lap steel and trumpet, with Per Kamfjord on drums, giving the track a sense of emotional impact without stripping away its intimacy.

Softly drifting into view with the pulse of instrumental notes, the sweep of airy lap steel tones and swell of stunning vocal layers gives way to Miriam’s tender vocals as she stitches emotive melodic threads and poignant lyrics into the dreamy musical fabric. Flowing with immersive arrangement and aching songwriting, “Snow” delivers a truly engrossing musical experience brimming with dazzling vocal performance and incredible musicianship, offering a beautiful alternative folk soundscape that’s impossible not to be moved by.

The song subtly turns outward, asking how people can become overwhelmed by a combination of personal burden and the noise surrounding everyday life. Miriam’s answer is not presented as a simple solution, she points towards community, openness and the importance of reaching people before feelings of powerlessness and worthlessness become unbearable.

“Snow” also arrives ahead of Mialuna’s forthcoming debut EP, set to arrive on the 10th of October, World Mental Health Day, followed by her debut album in February next yar. The project’s trajectory already feels closely tied to the philosophy behind it and Miriam sees winter as a natural period of rest and renewal, questioning why people are expected to remain permanently productive and fit themselves into fixed expectations. After years of movement followed by years of stillness, Mialuna is built around that contradiction, presenting music born from a pause, shaped by loss and given new life through sound.

Listen to Snow below

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