INTERVIEW: Venice Qin on her new single 'FREAK OUT': "You should be very confident with who you are, and you should own who you are, and your individuality."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Published: 2 June 2025
New Zealand’s Venice Qin is an expert at creating pop music that is danceable, joyous and packed with the most perfect beats and melodies, while also containing storylines that resonate.
Releasing her first single ‘Found Myself’ in 2018, her 2022 single ‘Asshole’ had a viral moment, leading to her debut EP Alien dropping in 2023. After returning to music at the end of 2024 with the single ‘Rodeo Star’, Qin has embraced a euphoric electronic-synth pop sound and has recently released her new single ‘FREAK OUT’.
Written by Qin and Maribelle, with mixing by Lucy Blomkamp (Khalid and 6LACK), and mastering by Antonia Gauci (Troye Sivan and Ke$ha) the track is an alt-electronic pop track with moody undertones that Qin says encourages everyone to find people that match your freak.
“’FREAK OUT’ is about the vulnerability of opening up to someone. From a lot of my life, I kept most people at a distance so that they could never hurt me,” Qin says. “When I eventually stopped doing that, it terrified the crap out of me. I suddenly became insecure of all the energy and chaos I bring. I began wondering if the chaos would always be too much for people. However, no matter how terrified I was and how much I freaked out, I kept sticking with these people as the risk and chemistry kept magnetically pulling us together.”
Alongside the release of ‘FREAK OUT’, Qin has also released a miniseries titled 5 STARS which shows her driving the streets of Sydney in a Uber, chatting to the drivers about her musical influences and asking them to rate her music.
QIn is a charismatic and irresistible performer with music that will always bring a smile to your face. To celebrate the release of ‘FREAK OUT’, Jett Tattersall recently sat down with Qin to chat all about the creation of the song.
Venice, it so lovely to chat with you again. Massive congrats on ‘FREAK OUT’, I'm getting this kind of body popping disco ball, I'm feeling dry ice, there's a lot of dry ice going on here, everything points to pop.
Hell yeah, it's very much drama diva moment.
It’s very similar to what we saw with your last single ‘New Woman’, you've got this sleek boldness with the sound and the visuals. There's an elevated queenness to the singles you've been putting out.
Thank you, that's so kind! Elevated queenness is all the things I aspire to be.
It's very much you, it still carries that vulnerable, quirky undercurrent, but it's holding a staff now. ‘FREAK OUT’, like you said, is a drama song, but it's delivered with such a punch. How do you reconcile those two parts of yourself - the vulnerability and the disco queen?
As a person, my life is just full of juxtapositions, with my culture and with my personality. I don't even understand how people know how I'm feeling most of the time. So in terms of the balance of things, it just feels very natural to me to be both very confident, but also have those moments of intimacy with people. I think it's very important to me to be able to share both sides of me with people, because I very much believe in both. I think that you should be very confident with who you are, and you should own who you are, and your individuality, but in order to show that confidence, sometimes you need to really be confident with the vulnerability. So it's a balance of the two, and I'm honoured that is coming through with my music.
I love that. You mentioned that the fear of your own chaos can be too much for people, tell me more about that.
I'm the first one to own I can be crazy sometimes. I like to think I'm very rational a lot of the time, but every now and then I'll be like, ‘Why am I so emotional right now? Why am I crying? This is not cool!’ Even as a child, I was always told I was quite intense, and to be honest, I always think I'm so chill! I've always been a very hard worker, and if I'm driven to do something, I will be zoned in on that task, and I won't really look away from it. Seeing that mindset in someone probably made me seem quite intense. Pop star life is crazy, especially as a hustling, emerging pop star, right? You're always working, you're always trying to think of the next thing, trying to always find inspiration, and I think that that comes with so much chaos as well, because the average person doesn't really have that much craziness going on in their life. So when people started telling me I was a lot, or when people I've dated say ‘I just don't think our lifestyles are compatible’, that really crushed me, and it was a lot to hear. So I think I’ve always wondered, ‘am I a lot to handle? Do I require a lot of patience from other people?’
You make a really good point about what it takes to be a pop star. There’s this preconceived notion, particularly in Australia and New Zealand, of this sort of flippancy attached to pop music. It's easy, it's bubblegum, it doesn't need a lot of work, and predominantly these words are thrown at women. But if you compare it to alternative garage bands, yes they're working hard, but they're presenting in a flannel shirt, and standing on stage not doing much. But that slick pop track, the video, there is a lot of hard work and hustle that has to be executed for the end result to be received as ‘effortless’ thing.
Absolutely, you are so on point. We work so hard. We're in our Spanx and our heels strutting around with our thick eyelashes falling all over our faces, just to create something that we hope that people will find digestible. Pop music stands for ‘popular music’, and of course there is a lot of popular music which isn't immediately digestible, sometimes the ability of hindsight can make some pieces of art more valuable over time. But when you're an emerging artist, people want something that's digestible from you. They want to be able to understand what you're doing, and so it needs to look really easy to and you need to look like someone that people would aspire to be.
It's a lot. It's intense - this is where it comes in! You have to be intense to do it
Exactly. But the thing is, I love every second of it. , I can't imagine doing anything else with my time.
On ‘FREAK OUT’, you had an incredible team on this track - Maribelle, Lucy Blomkamp, Antonia Gauci, trailblazers.I'm very curious, there must have been a moment within that collective that you just went, ‘Oh, this is the track’. What was that moment?
Honestly, it was really, really early on. Maribelle and I wrote that song the day we met in Sydney. I was working with so many new producers and different creatives at the time, and so I was very much into a flow of meeting a new person, talking for a bit, and see if we vibe enough to make something really cool. I remember immediately feeling with Maribelle that I really, really respected her. She's just such a badass, such a diva, and I cannot articulate just how much of a machine she is. She's one of my favourite people to collaborate with, because she gets to the point, and she just understands the assignment. We both liked a lot of the same things, and so we wrote the whole thing, and had baseline for production and everything in probably two to three hours, I was not in the studio for long! I remember leaving the studio having a really good feeling about the song, which is always a good feeling, I think, because truthfully, I don't always love what I make!
Oh I love that, some thing's just happen straight away. When we last spoke you said the music you create is music for people on the fringe, a little bit of the other. I feel like ‘FREAK OUT’ feels like it's trying to magnetise those people even further to you. How does it feel to be in that space now where you're not creating music from the margins, but you're actually inviting those people to be in that world?
It's my favourite, favourite thing. It's my favourite part of doing all this, besides the actual music. I love that it can bring comfort to other people, and it can make us feel like we're all part of something, and we can all be creative together. The other day I saw this person, Sam, who has been following my stuff for a while and has been so supportive on this whole journey. They made this ‘FREAK OUT’ collage and shared it with me, and it was just so special to see how they interpret the world that we're creating together. It's just so important to know that we know we're creating it together. Just to know that they love ‘FREAK OUT” and they think it's the best one so far, it's everything to me.
It makes all the intensity worth it!
Exactly. We're small but we're mighty!
I caught your very awkward conversation with your first Uber driver on your new online documentary 5 Stars, your Bon Jovi lover. He wasn't picking up initially, but you got there! Talk to me about 5 Stars and your chats with Uber drivers about pop music. Where did this come from?
I am a public transport girly, first and foremost. I love taking the train or bus when I can, but I do catch a lot of Ubers, unfortunately, because when you're wearing stiletto heels or my crazy shoes, you don't really want to have to walk up that many hills. I have had some really, really crazy Uber experiences over the years. The amount of times I'll chat to Uber drivers and I tell them I'm a pop artist, they'll play my songs and it's always a really cute moment. And I just thought that's something that would be so cool to share with other people. I wanted to really capture us getting to know the community around us, and trying to show people who aren't usually part of the Venice Qin realm interacting with my music and seeing what they make of it. At the end of the day, not everyone is a pop girly stan like I am, and so it's just really fascinating to see what a Bon Jovi lover makes of a song like ‘FREAK OUT’, which is clearly wanting to secretly give it a one star, but then feeling they were too polite to give me the one star and so gave me the five stars!
It wasn't a guilt thing, I definitely think you got him on board!
You should have seen the vibes in the car! He honestly was not loving it, he was literally like, ‘get out’.
But again, it's really about building that community, which I think is really beautiful. Is there a particular track, whether yours or someone else's, that you really hope comes out of a driver's mouth on one of these rides so you can talk to them excitedly about?
Okay, this is so stereotypical for me, but I would absolutely pass out, probably gag, fall to the floor of the car, if an Uber driver says ‘Vroom Vroom, by Charli XCX, and then we get to zoom through Sydney while singing it. That would make my life!
Obviously, we've been very, very much enjoying and dancing to ‘FREAK OUT’. We've had new music, we’ve had you chatting in cars with Uber drivers, not that I want to put any pressure, but what else are you dabbling into that you can share?
Well, there is a lot of new music coming, that's what I'll say. There's a lot of it, and it's coming sooner than people would expect, which will be very exciting. I think that people can tell now that we're really creating an extension of a new world. I never wanted it to be too far away from what we created with Alien but I think people are seeing with ‘New Woman’, and ‘FREAK OUT’ that we're really setting the tones for something even bigger, so be waiting for whatever that bigger thing is!
‘FREAK OUT’ is out now via Sony Music Australia. You can download and stream here.
Follow Venice Qin on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
Read our four page interview with Venice Qin in issue 15 of Women In Pop magazine
