Eva Liu didn’t think about her parents’ Cantopop vinyl collection much when she was growing up in Kent, a rural county of the UK. It was just one of the many subtle but powerful reminders that she wasn’t quite like all her homogeneous classmates. “As a kid, I was immersed in Cantopop without really realising what it was,” she remembers. “I just knew it was music that my friends’ families didn’t listen to.” Despite her Hong Kong-raised parents’ evident affection for the music, at home, “Cantonese was not encouraged,” she adds. “Growing up, I definitely assimilated to my surroundings. So I was like another white kid living in Kent.”
Now, under her proudly Cantonese stage name Mui Zyu — 妹豬 (mui6 zyu1), literally “little sister pig” — Liu is leaning into those childhood memories, hard. In October 2026, she releases a tribute to Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng, one of her parents’ favourites, with a cover of Teng’s 1986 Japanese-language song “Give Yourself to the Flow of Time” (時の流れに身をまかせ) — a ubiquitous uber hit covered in various languages, by everyone from Faye Wong to Chara, Hiroshi Itsuki to, er, a synthesised Jackie Chan duet.
Liu’s rendition is surprisingly faithful, with slicker modern beats and some subtle surf guitar, the most notable additions to this decidedly 80s-sounding original. It’s an oddly nostalgic turn for an indie-electro singer-songwriter whose own work is defined by its dreamy, fantastical futurism. “Teresa Teng’s voice has been with me for as long as I can remember,” she writes on the single’s release page. “Our go-to for karaoke at family gatherings. Growing up, so many of the words exchanged between my mum and me were these lyrics, sung at the top of our lungs, on long drives through the suburbs.”
She chose to sing the Japanese version because it will appear on a new release from a Tokyo label. Big Romantic Records just released an eight-track expanded vinyl reissue of Nothing or Something to Die For (Cantonese Tasting Menu) — re-recordings of songs from her second album, translated with the help of her dad and Emma-Lee Moss, the Hong Kong-born, London-based singer-songwriter who released four albums under the stage name Emmy the Great. Moss’s experience translating her own work proved invaluable.“ She would even change the melody sometimes, because that would fit the tone and the word,” says Liu.
Mother tongues and family ties
The original Cantonese Tasting Menu was released in late 2024, just before her first Hong Kong gig — a no-big-deal debut at Clockenflap 2024, where her “terrible” Cantonese was put to the test with a performance of “當娜喜歡寄生蟲” (“Donna Loves Parasites”). Her nerves were visible to the audience, but the local touch endeared her to new fans, and the festival brand has invited Liu back for her first headline show at The Wanch on 18 September.
Performing in Hong Kong for the first time was a “huge deal” for Liu. “First, because my family were there, and it’s the first time they had seen me perform,” she remembers. “I’ve been in bands for years and years, and I never invited them to anything.” It did not help that Liu’s abstract-sounding lyrics often only loosely disguise personal stories. That afternoon she performed “Mother’s Tongue”, a song about her own mother with the chorus: “Mum, you faked a smile / But I’ve known for a while / Don’t need to forgive you / For something you don’t mean to do.”
Used with permission, an audio clip of Liu’s mother sharing her maternal pride appears at the tune’s close, yet Liu remains relieved that her mother has not picked up on the song’s meaning. “It talks about something that my mum went through — something that I don’t think she necessarily knows that I know, even to this day. She’s heard the song, but I don’t think she’s really reading between the lines.”
Liu’s parents migrated to the UK shortly before giving birth, joining her paternal grandparents in parents Belfast. When she was aged four, Liu and her parents moved to Kent, where she passed her adolescence before moving to London to study film at King’s College London. Here she formed the edgy, promising indie-rock trio Dama Scout in 2016, whose best-known song is named “Suzie Wong,” shorthand for the cultural stereotype of exoticised, othered Asian women. On later songs, Liu incorporated Mandarin lyrics and titles.
Liu rarely visited Hong Kong in her early life, before her parents’ move home to retire around 2019. Returning to perform in the city provokes mixed feelings: she’s looking forward to reconnecting with family — especially her maternal grandmother, who turned 100 this year — but struggles to call it home. “It does feel like a homecoming in that my family are there, and Hong Kong is such a familiar place to me,” she muses. “But then I’ve never really immersed myself in the Hong Kong music scene. Like, I have a lot of cousins in Hong Kong, and I’m like, where can I go to see gigs? And they would suggest stadiums. Like, no — I’m talking about like, yeah, like small venues and local bands.”
The punchline? Liu is performing at arguably Hong Kong Island’s most expat- and guitar-centric music venue, local institution The Wanch — rather than, say, Mom Livehouse, the funny-sounding indie haven she read about after learning that one of her favourite bands, Deerhoof, had recently played there from Zolima’s article on the gig.
Bleeps, blops and games
The irony is redoubled when one considers Mui Zyu’s genesis as a pandemic-era side project. While Dama Scout took an enforced hiatus, Liu and bandmate Luciano Rossi took a job working on songs for the Life is Strange video game franchise — Liu is a big gamer — a brief that invited them to put their guitars down and begin experimenting with bleeps, blops and synths. Stuck at home, with a home studio littered with “mostly toy keyboards,” the ideas effortlessly flowed. “That was like the catalyst that got the writing brain really going and I ended up just like writing loads and loads of stuff,” she remembers. “It kind of just came together. There was a lot of messing around in the best possible way.”
Emerging in summer 2021, Mui Zyu’s debut four-track release A Wonderful Thing Vomits combines slow-burn beats, 80s synths and fuzz guitar into an airy, introspective bedroom pop stew. It wasn’t just the first time Liu had recorded solo but the first time she’d embraced her heritage. “I started the project, because of what was happening in the world,” she says simply. As anti-Asian prejudice spiralled incomprehensibly during the pandemic, she examined her identity more profoundly than ever before. “I was using music as therapy — seeing what was happening in the UK and the US, these hate crimes towards Asian people.”
Liu and Rossi went further on her debut long-player, Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century (2023), a hazy, ethereal, sound-scapey concept album that featured traditional Chinese string instruments including guzheng and erhu. “I am Chinese and I am owning it,” she said at the time. “Before, I would resent it.” A year later follow-up Nothing or Something to Die For emerged — a more mature set which refocused the personal streak in Liu’s songwriting, with a broader, intentional sonic palette, every element in place to frame the song.
That was two years ago. In the interim, Liu branched out; in February 2026, she contributed to Kew Gardens’ Orchid Festival soundtrack and performed at three Orchids After Hours events. She has composed atmospheric scores for art exhibitions and short films; especially meaningful was the chance to score Heart of the Lion. Directed by Rosanna Lee, the short film movingly focuses on Kelvin Chan, a British-born Chinese lion dancer, as he journeys back to Hong Kong in search of his own identity.
But no third album is immediately forthcoming. Last year, Liu and Rossi created and shelved a set of new songs. Having shared and grown so much personally and artistically, they are still figuring out Mui Zyu’s next sonic identity. “We actually had a whole body of work from last year that we’re now sort of putting aside,” she says. “We’re just, yeah, figuring out what that next album is going to be about.”
Mui Zyu performs at The Wanch, presented by Clockenflap, on 18 September 2026. For more details visit here on our What’s On page.