Louiza is the stage name of Rebecca Mimiaga, a Bay Area singer and songwriter who studied classical voice at Skidmore and earned her BFA at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York. Her early songs were sad and personal, through-composed for piano and voice and written like a diary. By her own account she got tired of playing them and wanted to write “in a bold, playful way”, so she built a new name from her first and middle names, Rebecca and Louise.
Party Trick was the first record under that name: nine songs recorded at Tiny Telephone in San Francisco and released on 15 October 2017. James Riotto produced, engineered and mixed it and played bass. Mimiaga sang, wrote the songs and played synths, Rhodes and piano, and the album credits add guitar, upright bass, drums, percussion and pedal steel from five more players. “Leash on a Tiger”, second in the running order at just over three minutes, followed the title track as a single at the start of October, under its own cover of an orange tiger in a blue collar. Impose wrote that it “moves in manners of surprise & fascination” and admired how little it needed to get there.
That restlessness is the point. Louiza was meant to be the bolder side of Mimiaga’s writing, and this song carries it: its nearest neighbour is the unruly, shape-shifting pop of Tune-Yards, Merrill Garbus’s project from the same city. Her later records moved toward folk-rock and softer shades of her writing. This one still pulls against the leash in its title.
Swim at Night followed in April 2019, then the EPs On, Off and White Light in 2021. During the pandemic she learned to produce in Ableton, and in October 2026 she released Like a Queen, an EP about grief.
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