Even when Jasper Harris and Aaron Shadrow aren’t churning out radio mainstays for the pop pantheon, they’re still clocked in at the hit factory. Under the name Miley, the producer duo have released four albums worth in a year’s time. Miley songs rarely reach a minute in length, but their immediacy makes it hard to write them off as scrapped ideas. Like a continuous mix without the transitions, they’re short, sweet, and stylishly maximalist. We chatted with Harris and Shadrow about Korean spas, Cody ChesnuTT, and the “characters in the Miley universe.” Read the Q&A, and listen to their new album Snow Day, below. 

Who is Miley? Who is Shelby, the namesake of your second album? Bonus question for Aaron—who is Daniel?

Miley: We are Miley, Miley Duo. Miley is about staying in touch with your inner child. There are many characters in the Miley universe—Shelby is one of them. So is Jessica, for example. 

What are your formative memories of electronic music? It gives you a bit of leeway to create anywhere, any time. What’s your favorite way to work together?

We are best friends. While the methods we use to create vary, it’s what we do as a duo outside of music that is most important to our process—we love going on weekend trips and making music in our underwear together for 48 hours straight surrounded by nature. Our lives are far more intertwined than you could ever imagine.

You assembled a stellar group of hot girls for your Shelby movie—how’d that come together? Why call it a movie and not a series of music videos?

“Shelby,” to us, feels like a feminine album. Our ambition was to compile camera roll footage from girls who inspire us. We called it a movie because it’s a film, and we are very proud of it. 

You have a song called “Wispa.” I can only imagine it’s referencing the iconic Korean spa in Los Angeles. Are you fans? It seems like a nice post-session activity. 

Yes, we go to Wi Spa once a week and often consider it more of a mid-session activity. We hope to perform there one day.

I found this wild playlist—not sure I’ve ever seen Ariel Pink next to The Beatles on a list of favorites. What’s influencing this music? What’s the most recent song you pulled up as a reference track together? 

We don’t reference any specific songs for Miley. We are more inspired by playfulness and adventure than any specific genre. That being said, recently we are looking to Cody Chestnutt’s 2002 The Headphone Masterpiece as a North Star for what freedom can feel like in an album context. 

Is there a producer you look up to as a model of what a producer can be—not just sonically, but culturally or creatively?

El Guincho and Arthur Russell.

You both have plenty of impressive pop cuts, but these songs are a bit less straightforward. What actually defines a “song” for you? Is it freeing to work on things that aren’t “radio friendly,” so to speak? 

Many of our compositions began as ideas we hoped to see through to radio songs, but often they went over artists’ heads. And then we found ourselves going back to listen to the bare bones ideas just as much as we would any radio song—that’s when we realized what defines a song for us—something that feels worth listening to again.

You’ve said that these past projects were unused fragments from Camila Cabello’s C,XOXO. In the future, will Miley still function as an archival landing place? At what point do y’all start working on ideas entirely for yourselves? 

It’s true. The original thesis for Miley was to give a home to all the unused music we made that we thought was amazing. And while Miley will always serve as an archival landing place, we now intentionally make songs for Miley under the same agenda as for any artist we work with: moving music forward.