Pamcy Named Her New House Album After a Fictional Filipino Supermarket. She Launched It at a Jollibee.

Manila producer Pamcy launched her new house album inside a Jollibee. On January 17, at the fast food chain's branch on Makati Avenue, a room of friends and fans heard SalaMART for the first time between orders of fried chicken, which is either the most Filipino album launch imaginable or exactly the point. The record is named after a fake supermarket chain, so of course the release party happened somewhere you actually buy groceries and snacks.

A Frog Sitting on a Pile of Coins

The cover art tells you what you're getting before the first track plays: a grinning green frog, the kind Filipino and Chinese shopkeepers keep by the register for good luck, perched on a mound of gold coins and pushing a shopping cart past shelves of instant noodles and soy sauce. Habunny, the Manila illustrator who drew it, built a whole retail universe around Pamcy's music. That's the point. SalaMART isn't a loose theme stapled onto a tracklist after the fact. It's Pamcy's second full-length album, and it completes a supermarket she's been stocking, one EP at a time, since 2021.

The Tracklist Reads Like a Sari-Sari Store Inventory

Eleven songs, each one named for something you'd actually find in a neighborhood sari-sari store, the tiny household convenience shops that dot every Philippine street corner. Togue (mung bean sprouts) opens the record. Quail Eggs, Nata de Coco, Kropek (prawn crackers) and Tawilis, a small freshwater fish caught almost nowhere outside Taal Lake, carry the middle stretch. Katol, the coil you burn to keep mosquitoes off at night, sits two tracks before Leche Flan. It closes on Melon Milk. None of this is a gimmick bolted onto generic house beats. Pamcy has said her writing starts with the concept before a single drum hits, and SalaMART is what that process looks like stretched across a full album: 36 minutes built from a life spent, as a kid, helping run her family's own convenience store, plus solo trips across the Philippines and the wider region while she wrote it.

A Producer Who's Been Building This World for Years

SalaMART isn't Pamcy's introduction to food as material. Her 2025 EPs Artificially Flavored! and Tingi, a Filipino word for buying things in small, cheap portions, already worked the same grocery-aisle territory, and her 2021 EP Sauce Aisle went out through Tokyo's Jun Records, proof the joke travels well outside Manila. She's described her own sound as a kind of omelet: a little bit of everything she likes, cracked into layered synths, vocal snippets and basslines with real groove, thrown into one pan. That describes SalaMART better than any press release could. It's dense, funny in the details, and never precious about being funny, which is harder to pull off than it sounds.

Worth the Trip to the Supermarket

Manila's beat scene has plenty of producers chasing atmosphere for its own sake. Pamcy's trick is refusing to separate the concept from the craft: the record only works because the grooves hold up with the joke stripped away, and it only means something because the joke isn't really a joke, it's an album about being Filipino, in the aisle of a store that doesn't exist, built by someone who spent her childhood behind the counter of one that did. The scene around her, from BuwanBuwan Collective's virtual club experiments to Jun Regalado and Thandii's genre-blending, keeps proving Manila's producers don't need to sound like anywhere else. SalaMART is streaming now. If you go looking for the physical version, don't be surprised if it turns up somewhere with fluorescent lighting and a receipt printer.

Cover art: SalaMART album artwork by Habunny (@habunnyart), courtesy of Pamcy.