AquariO - Get Some FCKN Therapy

AquariO comes flying in with “Get Some FCKN Therapy,” a debut that sounds like it was beamed in from somewhere completely off-grid. I’m hearing electropop, hyperpop, future garage and a bit of electroclash all smashing into each other, with fractured beats, warped textures and vocals that feel both intimate and slightly unhinged. There’s vulnerability underneath all the chaos and the track turns emotional overload into movement, which feels like a pretty perfect introduction to this strange new universe.

Interview with AquariO

1. “Get Some FCKN Therapy” is an unusually confrontational title for a debut. What does that phrase mean to you beyond the provocation, and what did you want listeners to confront when they hear it?

The title is confrontational, but it isn’t just me screaming at someone else to fix themselves. It’s also directed inward. “Get Some FCKN Therapy” is about reaching the point where you can no longer blame the world for every pattern you keep repeating. Eventually, you have to look at your programming, your wounds, your relationships and the versions of yourself you created just to survive.

I wanted the phrase to feel like an interruption—something loud enough to break through the endless noise and force a moment of recognition. Therapy can mean sitting across from a professional, but it can also mean dancing, making art, confronting your shadow or finally admitting that something in your life is no longer working.

The song isn’t asking listeners to become more acceptable. It’s asking them to become more honest. Sometimes healing begins with tenderness, and sometimes it begins with somebody—or some voice inside you—saying, “Enough. Look at this.”

2. The song pushes back against the constant pressure to be a certain kind of person, look a certain way and live according to someone else’s expectations. What was the specific frustration that made you want to turn that idea into music?

It wasn’t one isolated event. It was the cumulative exhaustion of feeling like life came with a script: look this way, achieve this by a certain age, make music that fits a recognizable formula and become a version of yourself that other people can easily understand.

I also grew up conscious of my father’s history as a member of the rock band Driver. For a long time, I felt pressure to understand myself through his legacy and to determine whether I was succeeding inside a path that had already been established. Some of that pressure was external, but much of it became internal programming. I was constantly thinking about what my music might become instead of experiencing what it already was.

Eventually, I became tired of keeping my metaphorical shoelaces tied so tightly. The frustration became a need for release. “Get Some FCKN Therapy” came from wanting to tear through those expectations and create something that felt alive, imperfect and completely mine.

3. You describe AquariO as an identity that brings together your evolution as a musician and as a person. What became possible creatively once you stopped making music under COATS and allowed yourself to build this new identity from scratch?

COATS was always thinking about the future. He was calculating, questioning and trying to understand where everything would lead before allowing himself to enjoy where he already was. He wasn’t fake, but he was programmed. He carried expectations about success, identity, family legacy and what an artist was supposed to sound like.

Killing COATS was symbolic, but the release was very real. Once I let that identity die, I stopped asking whether every creative decision was marketable, sensible or connected to some long-term strategy. AquariO gave me permission to follow instinct—to distort the vocal, fracture the beat, become confrontational, become spiritual, become sexual, become funny and let seemingly incompatible energies exist in the same song.

For the first time, I’m genuinely enjoying making and releasing music because I’m not demanding that every moment prove something about my future. AquariO is teaching me to chase the moment rather than chase an outcome. COATS is dead because that version of me had completed his purpose. AquariO could only enter the atmosphere after I created space for him.

4. Your sound sits between electropop, hyperpop, alternative dance and electronic experimentation, but you deliberately resist being contained by one genre. What do you think becomes more interesting when you stop worrying about whether a song belongs to a particular scene?

Genre can be useful as a language, but it becomes limiting when it starts functioning like a border. I’ve spent the past decade immersed in festivals, electronic music, house music, pop and experimental sounds. Those influences naturally exist inside me, so I don’t feel obligated to choose one and exile the others.

When I stop asking where a song belongs, the song can tell me what it needs. A pop melody can sit beside a fractured beat. A vulnerable lyric can live inside aggressive production. Something dark can still make you want to dance. That tension is usually where the most interesting work appears.

I’m not trying to be unconventional just for the sake of being difficult. I’m trying to remain open. The world already puts people into enough categories, and I don’t want to reproduce that programming inside my music. If a sound creates the right emotional frequency, it belongs in the AquariO universe.

5. The project is built around extraterrestrial experiences and a lifelong sense of connection to something beyond this world. How do those experiences translate into actual musical decisions—sounds, textures, melodies or production techniques?

When I speak about extraterrestrial contact, I’m not using it purely as a metaphor or an aesthetic device. I have had experiences that I understand as direct contact with extraterrestrial beings and higher intelligence. They began in my twenties while I was living in Seattle for a music project, and continued in Nashville, Los Angeles and, numerous times, in Joshua Tree.

Initially, those experiences were extremely difficult to process. They felt impossible, overwhelming and almost too strange to speak about. For years, I kept much of it private because I understood how people might react. Eventually, I found a small circle of best friends and members of my community with whom I could speak openly. Letting that secret out became incredibly freeing and cathartic. I no longer felt obligated to edit one of the most significant parts of my life simply to make myself easier for other people to understand.

In my experience, these beings represent a higher consciousness and intelligence. The communication I have felt from them has consistently encouraged me to create instinctively, enjoy my life and stop allowing fear or outside programming to control my art. That message became part of the foundation of AquariO: remain present, follow the frequency and create from the highest and most authentic version of myself.

My relationship with astrology helped me understand how all of these pieces connected. I’m a Libra Sun, Virgo Rising and Aquarius Moon. The Moon represents our internal and emotional world, and Aquarius is often associated in modern astrology with the unconventional, the cosmic, higher consciousness and experiences beyond ordinary social boundaries. When I finally said, “This is me—I am AquariO,” everything else seemed to melt away. Things that had previously felt disconnected suddenly aligned. I dedicated this musical identity to my Aquarius Moon, to that cosmic lineage and to the contact experiences that transformed my life.

That history directly influences the music. I’m drawn to metallic textures, warped transmissions, fractured rhythms, layered voices and sounds that feel both emotionally intimate and technologically unfamiliar. I want the production to feel like a signal moving between dimensions—something recognizable enough to enter but strange enough to suggest that it originated somewhere else. The extraterrestrial element is not decoration placed over the music; it influences the atmosphere, the visual language and the way I understand creativity itself.

I know many other people have lived through experiences they cannot easily explain and have remained silent because they fear ridicule or isolation. I want them to feel less alone, more connected and perhaps inspired to trust themselves. There is still very little meaningful visibility around this subject, and I’m willing to stand visibly inside it.

Not everyone will believe me, and I genuinely don’t give a fuck anymore. I have no reason to invent something that was initially so difficult for me to carry. I’m not here to convince anyone or win an argument. I’m here to create, have fun, live authentically and express what these experiences have meant in my life. They made me stronger, more aligned and more willing to inhabit my highest self. AquariO is the artistic embodiment of that release.

6. There’s a striking contrast between darkness, vulnerability and emotional chaos on one side, and the freedom and euphoria of the dancefloor on the other. What makes dancing such an effective place to process difficult emotions?

The mind can intellectualize an emotion forever, but the body eventually demands somewhere for that energy to go. Dancing gives grief, anger, anxiety and desire a physical exit. You don’t have to explain the feeling perfectly—you can sweat it out, scream it back at the speaker and allow the rhythm to carry what language cannot.

That’s why dance music has always felt spiritual to me. A dancefloor can hold hundreds of people experiencing completely different private emotions while moving inside the same frequency. There is something communal and almost ritualistic about that. For a few minutes, you are both entirely yourself and part of something larger.

I’m interested in music that allows darkness and euphoria to coexist because that feels honest. Healing is rarely clean or quiet. Sometimes catharsis sounds like crying alone, and sometimes it sounds like losing your mind under flashing lights at two in the morning. Both can bring you back to yourself.

7. You describe AquariO’s universe as a place where being misunderstood or “beautifully unhinged” can become a source of belonging. Was that sense of not quite fitting in something you experienced before you started making music this way?

Absolutely. I’ve spent much of my life feeling as though I could move between worlds without completely belonging to any single one. Being queer, spiritual, emotionally intense and creatively restless can make you very aware of the ways people try to simplify one another. I often felt that I needed to translate myself into something more digestible.

AquariO was born when I stopped translating. Instead of treating the misunderstood parts of myself like liabilities, I began building the entire world around them. “Beautifully unhinged” doesn’t mean romanticizing destruction or avoiding responsibility. It means acknowledging that intensity, strangeness, contradiction and emotional excess can contain beauty when they are expressed honestly.

I want people who have been told they are too much, too sensitive, too strange or too difficult to enter this universe and recognize themselves. Belonging shouldn’t require you to sand down everything distinctive about who you are.

8. Every element is written and engineered in-house, from intimate vocal layers to fractured beats and otherworldly textures. How do you know when a strange production idea is revealing something important about the song rather than simply making it more unusual?

The question I ask is whether the strange choice reveals an emotion that a cleaner choice would conceal. If I remove that sound and the song loses part of its psychological truth, then it belongs there. If it only calls attention to itself without deepening the experience, it probably doesn’t.

I work very intuitively. A distorted vocal might represent a thought becoming obsessive. A fractured beat can create the feeling of someone trying to escape a pattern. An unexpectedly intimate vocal can pull the listener closer immediately after the production has pushed them away. Those contrasts are rarely random; they create the internal architecture of the song.

I’m not interested in adding unusual elements merely to prove that the music is experimental. The experimentation has to serve the emotional world. Strange production is most powerful when listeners may not consciously understand why it affects them, but their bodies recognize that something important has shifted.

9. “Get Some FCKN Therapy” is presented as the first transmission from a much larger world. How much of the AquariO universe already exists beyond this debut, and how much are you discovering as you continue making music?

A significant part of the AquariO universe already exists. I’ve been writing music for over twenty years, and songwriting has always been running through my brain as a creator. Throughout that time, I’ve collected provocative themes, controversial moments and completely bizarre ideas that made me feel something—but I didn’t always know where to put them.

Some of those ideas originated while I was creating as COATS, and others have lived inside me for years without belonging to any particular identity. They were often shelved or placed on the back burner because they felt too strange, too confrontational or too difficult to categorize. I didn’t always have the confidence to turn them into finished records and release them into the world.

AquariO responds to those ideas differently. AquariO says, “Yes, bitch. That’s fucking insane. That’s amazing. It makes me feel something—pull it out of your subconscious and throw it into the universe.” Instead of questioning whether an idea is too weird to exist, this identity celebrates the weirdness as evidence that the idea needs to exist.

That has been incredibly cathartic and healing. AquariO allows me to stand firmly behind the ideas I once questioned and say, “It doesn’t fucking matter. This is iconic, and it’s going out there.” There is no possibility that these songs will remain hidden indefinitely. They are happening now because I’m finally willing to give them the commitment, confidence and creative world they deserve.

Electronica became the portal through which those ideas could mutate into their highest forms. Experimental production gives them permission to become fractured, euphoric, abrasive, metallic, emotional or completely unhinged. Ideas that previously had nowhere to live suddenly make perfect sense inside this world of electropop, experimental pop and electronic music. AquariO didn’t simply recover the material from the shelf—he transformed it into something that could only have arrived through this identity.

There are already plans for several singles, as well as a much larger project: my debut album as AquariO. I haven’t officially announced it, and I’m intentionally not attaching an exact date to it yet, but I expect it to arrive sometime within the next year. I’m allowing the release schedule to reveal itself naturally because this entire era is about following the flow rather than trying to control the future.

Without giving away too much, the album is enormous conceptually and fucking incredible sonically from beginning to end. I genuinely believe I have created one of the most iconic experimental electropop records of all time. That is a massive statement, and I stand behind it. It is ambitious, emotionally volatile, strange, euphoric and completely committed to its own universe. I’m unbelievably excited for listeners—and for the music industry—to experience the full scale of what I’ve created.

At the same time, I’m deliberately refusing to over-plan how the world encounters it. That would reproduce the same future-obsessed programming I’m trying to escape. I know the visual language, the emotional frequency and the larger mythology, but I’m allowing the road between each transmission to reveal itself in real time.

That is what “chasing the moment” means to me. I’m fully present with this song instead of treating it merely as a stepping-stone toward the album. I’m following where the frequencies lead, trusting my instincts and remaining open to guidance from my galactic angels and the alien family I feel on the other side. The universe already exists, but the complete map isn’t supposed to be visible yet. “Get Some FCKN Therapy” is simply the first portal into it.

10. You describe this era as the sound of finally becoming completely yourself. What is something you were previously holding back—musically or personally—that AquariO finally gave you permission to explore?

I was holding back my full intensity. I would edit myself before anyone else had the opportunity to respond—softening the aggression, questioning the spirituality, controlling the sexuality and trying to make unusual creative choices easier to explain. I was afraid of being perceived as excessive, unserious or too far outside what people expected from me.

AquariO gave me permission to stop apologizing for the combination. I can be confrontational and vulnerable, masculine and fluid, spiritual and profane, deeply sincere and completely ridiculous. I can create something beautiful without making it polite. Musically, that means trusting unconventional structures, abrasive textures, intimate vocals and whatever emotional contradiction the song requires.

Personally, it means living in the present more than I ever have. I’m no longer creating from the anxiety of who I need to become. I’m creating from the electricity of who I am right now. That may be the most radical permission AquariO has given me: the permission to let this moment be enough. So, Let’s Get FreQy & chase the moment together.

(•)> That's all, Folks! Check AquariO out on the Pigeon Opinion Playlist