Mareux is the stage name of Aryan Ashtiani (born February 22, 1992), an American singer, songwriter and producer from Los Angeles of Iranian descent, whose synth-drenched cover of The Cure's “The Perfect Girl” became a defining sound of early-2020s TikTok, six years after he first recorded it alone in a bedroom. The song's slow-burn, algorithm-driven breakthrough turned Ashtiani, who was training to become a physician assistant and working as an LA County EMT at the time, into a Warner Records artist and one of the flagship names of the streaming-era darkwave revival, a scene he shares critical company with in Artemas, ThxSoMch and Ekkstacy. He has released two studio albums, Lovers From the Past (2023) and Nonstop Romance (2025), both on Revolution/Warner.
Aryan Ashtiani was born February 22, 1992, in Los Angeles, California, and is categorized by Wikipedia among American artists of Iranian descent. He has direct, lived ties to Iran, describing childhood summers spent there where he first discovered Eurodance music by watching Polish MTV channels, an origin story he has repeated consistently across interviews. His parents are from Iran, and he grew up listening to Persian love songs at home, a household soundtrack he credits directly for his own lyrical fixation on romance and heartbreak. Asked whether traditional Persian modal music (Dastgah) shaped his sound, he told New Noise Magazine: “I guess I do, maybe not directly, but I do have an affinity for minor scales and melancholy melodies, which I can attribute to listening to classical Persian music growing up.”
He began playing guitar around age 10 or 11, later picked up upright bass in his school orchestra, learning music theory and notation along the way, and started producing electronic music as a hobby in his late teens and early twenties. He studied film at the University of California, Santa Barbara, switching out of an economics major, and graduated in 2015 with a bachelor's degree in art, though he has said he rarely attended class and instead spent his time making beats.
His earliest recorded output, released in 2011 and 2012 under the Mareux name, was not darkwave at all: it was French electro, house and EDM. He deliberately chose a stage name meant to sound like a “fake French name” because he was infatuated with the Ed Banger Records label and half-seriously hoped it might help him get signed there. He released a debut EP, Decade, in 2013. The pivotal creative shift came in 2012, when he heard Canadian musician Robert Alfons's project TR/ST, whose self-titled debut album he says “shook” him by blending melancholy Eurodance beats with haunting baritone vocals, the direct template for the sound he would build. His older sister introduced him to Interpol, whose debut album he says “blew him away,” opening the door to Joy Division, New Order, the Smiths and the Cure.
Ashtiani pursued a parallel career in healthcare that ran alongside, and at times competed directly with, his music. From 2015 to 2018 he stepped away from music almost entirely. By 2020 he was working as an LA County EMT while training toward becoming a physician assistant, with an explicit goal of practicing medicine in underserved LA communities, a plan that was still underway even as “The Perfect Girl” was going viral. As he told Roland Articles, he was “in a master's program to be an assistant physician” when the song “blew up” and record labels started calling.
“The Perfect Girl” originated almost by accident. Ashtiani built the instrumental first and, stuck on lyrics, searched AZLyrics.com, randomly clicked on a Cure song, and found that singing its opening lines over his beat simply worked, so he pivoted the track into a cover rather than an original composition. He uploaded it to SoundCloud on April 21, 2015, coincidentally Robert Smith's birthday, which he calls “totally coincidental. Stars aligned for that one.”
The track built a quiet, entirely organic cult following in Eastern Europe, particularly Russia, and later South America, for years before any mainstream US recognition. He has said this Eastern European fanbase, engaged through a Russian Facebook group, “made up the bulk of my fan base” before he was even distributing through Spotify or Apple Music, and it directly inspired his song “Gopnik.” He officially uploaded the track to streaming platforms in 2019 after his manager flagged that the YouTube upload had reached roughly 30,000 views, a number that felt significant at the time.
He has spoken with pride about early recognition from one of his idols, the Belarusian synth-punk band Molchat Doma, who shouted him out upon the release of his 2020 EP Predestiny: “I was overjoyed! To get that kind of recognition from one of my favorite bands in the scene is an incredible honor.” On his long-cultivated Eastern European audience, he told New Noise Magazine: “Without the support I have gotten in the past seven or so years from these fans, I don't think I would still be making music. I get letters of support from kids around the world on a weekly basis, and so my writing always has them in mind.”
The song's true mass-virality wave began on TikTok in the summer of 2021. Several high-profile TikTok users incorporated the song into their videos, catalyzing wider spread, and it became closely associated with fan-edit trends built around the film American Psycho and later Nightcrawler, fitting a “sigma male” and “based” meme aesthetic. The specific origin point is documented as a July 23, 2021 TikTok by user @electraviolence.c, using the song in a fancam of actress Nikki Reed, followed by a cluster of additional viral uploads that pushed the sound into mainstream TikTok culture by late October 2021. The song debuted and peaked at No. 35 on Billboard's Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart in December 2021, and later peaked at No. 14 on the UK Independent Singles Breakers Chart in December 2022.
The commercial fallout was immediate. While still enrolled in his physician-assistant graduate program, Ashtiani began fielding calls from record labels, ultimately signing with Warner Records via its Revolution Records imprint, initially for a single-song deal with an album option that was later exercised once the label saw sustained performance. Roland Articles framed the timing bluntly: “The element of chance has long played a role in artistic success... These days, algorithms control much of our experience, down to the music we get fed. This phenomenon means many musical acts can achieve a breakthrough streaming hit without traditional touring or promotion. For Aryan Ashtiani, aka Mareux, the viral success of his creative interpolation of ‘The Perfect Girl’ by the Cure arrived six years after its 2015 recording. It couldn't have been less premeditated.”
Alternative Press revisited the collision between his healthcare ambitions and sudden musical success as a defining, almost cinematic detail of his origin story even years later: for a period he was simultaneously training for emergency medicine shifts as an LA County EMT and fielding calls from major-label A&R teams, a juxtaposition he has described candidly rather than as an easy or foregone choice.
Mareux's live career compressed what for most artists takes years into under twelve months. His first-ever live show took place in June 2022, by his own account one of the roughest gigs he's played: “probably one of the worst shows that I played,” he told Blurred Culture, adding, “I didn't even have an amp until last year, like everything was straight into interfaces. And just super janky.” Less than a year later, in April 2023, he played both weekends of Coachella, a jump Blurred Culture's interview directly framed as evidence of the accelerated, algorithm-driven path to breakthrough that increasingly defines viral-era musicians rather than the traditional touring-and-radio route. By his second Coachella weekend, he described the performance finally “clicking,” including crowd-surfing for the first time.
He has since become a recurring, bookable name on the legacy post-punk and goth festival circuit rather than a one-off TikTok novelty: Cruel World Festival in Pasadena (May 2025, alongside New Order, Til Tuesday and DEVO), Darker Waves, and the inaugural Los Darks Festival in Santa Ana (March 2026, alongside Caifanes, Johnny Marr, Twin Tribes and The Adicts), where he was billed as “one of the world's most-streamed darkwave artists.” In September 2026 he is announced as a special guest for AFI at Observatory Festival Grounds in Santa Ana, alongside Kumo 99 and L.A. Witch. He also headlined sold-out shows at the Fox Theater in Pomona and the Novo in Los Angeles in December 2025, and a fall 2026 UK and European tour spans London, Paris/Montreuil, Athens, Istanbul and Tbilisi, a routing that directly reflects his long-documented Eastern European fanbase.
Mareux's debut studio album, Lovers From the Past, arrived May 5, 2023, on Revolution/Warner, preceded by the singles “Night Vision” (whose music video featured RuPaul's Drag Race alum Gottmik), “Glass” (a duet with Kristina Esfandiari of King Woman), the title track, and “Little Lies.” He has said several of the album's tracks, including “Killer,” were already five years old by the time they were released, written “when I was younger and more depressed.”
His sophomore album, Nonstop Romance, followed June 27, 2025, recorded through 2024 in his Lincoln Heights bedroom studio in Los Angeles. He has described a deliberate pivot away from his signature brooding coldwave template toward more danceable, eclectic influences: “I'm trying to incorporate more styles like techno, Eurodance, Italo-disco, and synthpop while maintaining the integrity of my personal style.” Lead single “Laugh Now Cry Later” was written intermittently since 2018 and is, by his own repeated description, the saddest song on the record, despite his being happily partnered at the time of writing: “Luckily, I'm in an awesome and happy relationship, so feeling like a sad boy doesn't come as naturally these days. Still, I wanted to capture the feeling of being in a relationship where, despite how much assurance you receive, you can still feel the other person detaching from you,” he told Alternative Press. Asked to define the album's title concept, he described “nonstop romance” as “complete submission to another person... not in a weird sexual way or anything. I keep things so vanilla. Just in the sense that you make your life's entire mission their happiness and fulfillment.” Unexpectedly, the fan favorite when he previewed the album for friends was “Wild at Heart,” which he called “a silly, goofy, summer Italo disco song,” while his own favorite is the instrumental opener “Blackmail,” a “club banger / techno / melt-your-face kind of track... dramatic and swells up and down.”
Reviews of Nonstop Romance reflect a broad consensus that Mareux deliberately widened his sound beyond the brooding coldwave palette that made him famous. Beatique called the album “stunning... from start to finish,” singling out the title track as “dance floor gold” merging an EBM stomp with “a very cheery synth melody.” New Noise Magazine highlighted “Ébène Fumé,” featuring vocalist Riki, as “the strongest off the record,” built on “Crystal Castles-like synths” wrapped around “hushed vocals.” UK outlet Electricity Club was more mixed, situating Mareux within a broader wave of “darker post-punk flavoured acts like TR/ST, Korine, Drab Majesty, Actors, Vandal Moon, Die Sexual and Glass Spells,” and criticizing the deliberately lo-fi production on “Blackmail” and “Radio Club” for lacking “a hook,” while conceding “Ébène Fumé,” likened to “a synthwave reinterpretation of ‘Running Up That Hill,’” was “easily the album's best song.” Joyzine described the cover of “The Perfect Girl” as bending the Cure's “meandering ditty” so far “backwards” that “it'll put your nan off her main,” and called “Blackmail” a track that “fizzes and crackles and thrashes about in distorted bliss” like “a vengeful terminator tearing through a neon wilderness.”
Reviewing 2023's Lovers From the Past, Post-Punk.com described the title track as melding “raw, foreboding vocals with a pulsating bassline and an eerie ambiance,” a “nocturnal ode to unfulfilled longing,” while “DTLA” was singled out as “a discordant, shadowy disco rhythm evocative of the Knight Rider theme.” Lyric-analysis site Songtell framed “Killer” as a study in “obsession and emotional pain stemming from separation,” anchored by the recurring line “the distance is a killer.”
Mareux's sound is classified by Wikipedia under darkwave, post-punk, gothic rock and electronic music. The Guardian's 2024 feature on the darkwave revival places him among the artists at the center of the genre's streaming-era resurgence, alongside Artemas, ThxSoMch, Boy Harsher, Ekkstacy, Twin Tribes, the KVB, Molchat Doma and Pastel Ghost, tracing lineage to the Cure, Depeche Mode and the broader 80s goth underground; the piece specifically cites “The Perfect Girl” and notes it took six years for the cover to gain viral traction, largely through American Psycho-themed TikTok edits. Despite the genre label, Ashtiani resists being pigeonholed visually or as a scene ambassador: “I don't want to say I'm like the face of darkwave or anything, because it's disrespectful to people who actually work in that genre... I'm not outwardly goth; I just look like a normal guy.” He has also said, more bluntly: “I've never really listened to goth music. Really, ever in my life. It was... just the music I wanted to make. And then, I kind of got categorized as being a goth band or goth artist.” He describes his own project as “a synth-based musical project heavily influenced by dark music, minor-key melodies, love songs, post-punkers, and dance music... I sing about ghosts, slavs, and getting my heartbroken.”
No direct musical collaboration between Mareux and Artemas has been documented; the connection between the two is one of shared genre lineage and critical grouping rather than a personal or business partnership, echoed in fan communities where a Reddit r/darkwave thread recommends “Moonvampire, Mareux, Artemas” as a cluster of related listening. Ella Boh has separately named Mareux, alongside The Marías, as one of her own “ones to watch” in Q&As with Ones to Watch, an artist-to-artist endorsement that positions him as a direct reference point within her own darkwave-adjacent pop project.
His visuals draw heavily from Andrei Tarkovsky, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Hype Williams; he has said he kept a muted CRT television running films by these directors while recording Nonstop Romance in his bedroom studio, aiming for a found-footage aesthetic built from “smeared synths and raw club beats” rather than polish. The video for “The Perfect Girl,” directed by the agency Muted Widows, starred RuPaul's Drag Race Season 7 winner Violet Chachki in a vintage-vamp mid-century apartment setting. The August 2025 video for “Wild at Heart,” directed by Natalia McGowan and Anastasiya Bobrova, riffs on David Lynch's Wild at Heart and its “Wicked Game” music-video legacy, with Ashtiani's real-life partner Natalia appearing on-camera as his co-star, the first Mareux visual to feature her rather than a professional actor or drag performer. His gear identity centers on Roland Boutique synths, the JU-06A and D-05, for their compact desk-friendly form factor, alongside FL Studio as his primary DAW.
Mareux is signed to Warner Records through its darker-leaning imprint Revolution Records; the deal began as a single-song signing for “The Perfect Girl” with an album option, later exercised once the label observed the song's sustained performance. His management is handled by Miguel at International House of Sound, plausibly the same Miguel Jimenez behind the small independent imprint I Heard It In Paris, which released his 2020 EP Predestiny, suggesting management continuity from his indie years into his major-label era. Booking for North America, Central and South America, Australia and New Zealand runs through Natasha at Ground Control Touring, while European booking runs through Diego at Swamp Booking.
“The Perfect Girl” has been formally certified RIAA Platinum in the United States, BPI Silver in the United Kingdom, and RMNZ Gold in New Zealand, all sales-plus-streaming equivalent certifications. Because the track is a cover rather than an original composition, its registered songwriting credits belong entirely to the Cure's Robert Smith, Simon Gallup, Porl Thompson, Lol Tolhurst and Boris Williams, with Mareux credited only as producer, mixing engineer and mastering engineer on commercial metadata, meaning the underlying publishing royalties flow to the Cure's writers rather than to Ashtiani even though the sound recording and its viral exploitation are entirely his.
Streaming figures have been reported inconsistently across the song's life, typical of viral-track coverage over time. Press materials around the April 2023 Lovers From the Past rollout cited over 5.6 million monthly Spotify listeners, described in his own press as “unprecedented for darkwave,” and put “The Perfect Girl” north of 214 million Spotify streams, with Wikipedia later citing over 250 million plays as of May 2023. TikTok plays across the sound were put at 2.3 billion as of 2022. By mid-2025, around the release of Nonstop Romance, UK outlet Electricity Club reported his monthly Spotify count had settled to “just under 4 million monthly listeners,” still major-label scale but down from the 2023 peak, consistent with the natural decay curve of a catalog anchored by one dominant viral single. Third-party tracker Music Metrics Vault recorded his aggregate Spotify catalog at 878.4 million total plays as of July 20, 2025, climbing at roughly 450,000 to 500,000 new streams per day across the tracked window, a pace suggesting durable, ongoing catalog consumption well past the original 2021 to 2022 viral spike.
Ashtiani describes himself in blunt, self-deprecating terms: “It's a weird life, [but] honestly, it's the life I've always wanted, because I'm a very, very lazy person that cannot hold a job to save my life.” He has called himself “a very nervous, self-conscious person” who cannot record vocals with anyone else present, and has said he finds it “next to impossible to write music” when his personal life is in disorder. He has been candid about pre-show anxiety: “I'd get very stressed before [shows]... I wouldn't be able to sleep, and I'd just feel sick... The shows themselves, once you're on stage, [it's] actually fun.” On the grueling process of making Lovers From the Past, he said: “Locking yourself in this studio for like 16-18 hours a day, and just trying to make it happen. So, it's a very grueling process. I'm not really looking forward to the next one.”
His girlfriend, Natalia, is directly named in a June 2025 Alternative Press feature as the dedicatee of Nonstop Romance: “The album is a love letter to Natalia, my girlfriend. I always wanted to make something for her that she can enjoy from start to finish. There are a lot of references to our love, from the genres I chose to explore to the titles of the tracks.” She most likely corresponds to Natalia McGowan, credited as co-director of the “Wild at Heart” video and its on-screen female lead, meaning she is an active creative collaborator on his visual output rather than a private-life subject referenced only at a distance. On the question of representation within the historically white-coded goth and coldwave scene, he has said: “I've personally never felt anything like [pressure or anxiety as an artist of color]. In LA at least, most of the kids who are in the scene are non-White. I can't speak for other areas. Everyone I've interacted with has been very nice and welcoming. I'll take that as a positive sign that things have changed.” He frames his own success in modest terms: “Success is when you can be proud of yourself for pulling off something difficult.”
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2011–2012 | Records early French electro and house material under the Mareux name |
| 2013 | Debut EP Decade released |
| April 21, 2015 | Original “The Perfect Girl” cover uploaded to SoundCloud, Robert Smith's birthday |
| 2015–2018 | Steps away from music almost entirely to pursue healthcare |
| 2019 | “The Perfect Girl” officially distributed to Spotify and Apple Music |
| 2020 | Predestiny EP released while working as an LA County EMT |
| Summer–Fall 2021 | “The Perfect Girl” goes viral on TikTok via American Psycho-themed edits |
| December 8, 2021 | Official commercial single release via Revolution/Warner; peaks No. 35 Billboard Hot Rock & Alternative Songs |
| April 2022 | Music video released starring Violet Chachki |
| June 2022 | First-ever live Mareux performance |
| April 2023 | Plays both weekends of Coachella |
| May 5, 2023 | Debut studio album Lovers From the Past released |
| May 2025 | Performs at Cruel World Festival, Pasadena |
| June 27, 2025 | Sophomore album Nonstop Romance released |
| August 2025 | “Wild at Heart” video released, featuring partner Natalia |
| December 2025 | Sold-out headline shows at the Fox Theater (Pomona) and the Novo (Los Angeles) |
| 2025 | “The Perfect Girl” 10th Anniversary vinyl edition released |
| March 28, 2026 | Performs at inaugural Los Darks Festival, Santa Ana |
| September 19, 2026 | Announced as special guest for AFI, Santa Ana |
| Fall 2026 | UK and European tour: London, Paris/Montreuil, Athens, Istanbul, Tbilisi |
Yes. Wikipedia, a French-language interview in which he states “Mon vrai nom est Aryen” (my real name is Aryan), and press materials all confirm his birth name as Aryan Ashtiani, born February 22, 1992, in Los Angeles.
No. It is a cover of a 1987 song by the Cure. Ashtiani built the instrumental and, unable to finish original lyrics, found that the opening lines of the Cure's song fit over his beat, so he recorded it as a cover. Commercial metadata credits the Cure's Robert Smith, Simon Gallup, Porl Thompson, Lol Tolhurst and Boris Williams as songwriters, with Mareux credited as producer and engineer.
Yes. He worked as an LA County EMT and was enrolled in a graduate program to become a physician assistant when “The Perfect Girl” went viral and record labels began calling, a career fork he has discussed candidly in multiple interviews.
The Guardian's 2024 feature on the darkwave revival groups Mareux with Artemas, ThxSoMch, Ekkstacy and others as central to the genre's mainstream streaming-era breakout. No direct collaboration between Mareux and Artemas has been documented; the link is one of shared genre lineage and critical and fan-community grouping. Ella Boh has separately named Mareux as one of her own artists to watch.
It holds RIAA Platinum certification in the United States, BPI Silver in the United Kingdom, and RMNZ Gold in New Zealand, all sales-plus-streaming equivalent certifications, alongside a reported gold certification in France that could not be independently cross-verified against SNEP's certification database.
| Release | Type | Year | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| Decade | EP | 2013 | Independent |
| “The Perfect Girl” (original) | Single (cover) | 2015 | Independent |
| “Spectral Tease” | Single | 2020 | I Heard It In Paris |
| Predestiny | EP | 2020 | I Heard It In Paris |
| “The Perfect Girl” (re-release) | Single (cover) | 2021 | Revolution/Warner |
| “Glass” (feat. King Woman) | Single | 2022 | Revolution/Warner |
| “Night Vision” | Single | 2022–2023 | Revolution/Warner |
| “Lovers From the Past” | Single | 2023 | Revolution/Warner |
| “Little Lies” | Single | 2023 | Revolution/Warner |
| Lovers From the Past | Studio album | 2023 | Revolution/Warner |
| “Ébène Fumé” (feat. Riki) | Single | 2025 | Revolution/Warner |
| “Laugh Now Cry Later” | Single | 2025 | Revolution/Warner |
| Nonstop Romance | Studio album | 2025 | Revolution/Warner |
| “Wild at Heart” (video) | Single/Visual | 2025 | Revolution/Warner |
| “The Perfect Girl” (10th Anniversary Edition) | Vinyl reissue | 2025 | Revolution/Warner |
Further reading: Mareux's story runs alongside the broader darkwave revival documented on Artemas's page, as well as Ella Boh's, ThxSoMch's, and Ekkstacy's entries, all of whom share critical and fan-community placement within the genre's 2020s streaming-era resurgence.