It’s not unusual for pop artists to draw from punk music and culture to rough up their style, but it’s rare that their connection to the culture that goes beyond aesthetic appreciation from a distance. Growing up in Denmark, Mø lived it, and for a few wild months in the spring of 2012, she brought it to New York, after Mø and Pedersen's teacher in art school helped them get an internship with the queer music icon JD Samson. During the day, they'd help Samson's band MEN with the marketing and promotion of their latest EP, then at night they'd play MOR shows at house parties and DIY venues around Brooklyn. “She was super kind, fashionable, independent, driven, and fucking cool,” recalled Samson via email. “My second ever Instagram picture was of them at Kellogg's Diner [in Williamsburg] while I bought them some terrible food. I remember laughing with them as I started learning about what all the kids were doing. In a way, having them around made me realize how old and unhip I was!”

When the internship ended, Mø moved back to Denmark and into a communal house in Copenhagen’s anarchist community of Christiania. After being hooked up with a cracked version of Logic by a boyfriend, she started making plans to strike out on her own. Inspired by the button-pushing of Peaches and the bratty electropop of French vocalist Uffie, as well as the brash electro-rap of Danish female MCs such as Lucy Love and Linkoban, she bashed out a bunch of songs in her bedroom with titles like “When I Saw His Cock,” “Grease Me Up With Gravy Baby,” and “A Piece Of Music To Fuck To.” She booked shows at local punk venues, performing under the name Mø for the first time, which means “maiden” or “virgin” in Danish. “I tried to provoke as much as possible,” she says, scrolling through dozens of unreleased demos on her MacBook. “For me it was a super political thing about youth culture gone wild, so I was putting on this alter ego as a crazy, insane, young bitch girl. I think people were like, ‘Are you being for real? Do you smoke crack?’ It also sounded like crap. But it was a time.”

