The sidewalk outside the Monkey House was cluttered with the overflow from a sold-out show last Friday, and pulsating waves of synths and trancelike beats washed out of the Winooski club’s open windows and onto the street. Burlington indie-soul act Acqua Mossa had just launched into “THIS IS REAL,” the opening track from their freshly released debut LP. As keyboardist Derek Rice and drummer Tim Heaghney laid down a head nod-inducing groove, vocalist Stephanie Wilson stepped to the microphone and sang a haunting melody as gorgeous as it was foreboding.
“This is so insane,” she sang of melting glaciers and nature under assault. “When she’s gone, she won’t come back again / This is real / This is real.”
The band, which formed in 2020 after its members performed in groups such as smalltalker and JUPTR, has finally completed work on its first record. It was a yearslong process with multiple challenges, both musical and in real life, from postproduction headaches to Wilson’s 2022 breast cancer diagnosis.
After five years of toil and heartache, the band has emerged with Acqua Mossa, an emotionally dense self-titled record on which Wilson writes about everything from her illness to the Black Lives Matter movement to the climate crisis. That heaviness is set to a sound that blurs EDM, soul, indie rock, hip-hop and futuristic R&B into one cohesive album with startling clarity and vision. With the record now out in the world, the band is closing a long chapter and focusing on the next one.
“We’ve been working on this record for years now,” Wilson told me a few days before the show, when I met up with her, Rice and Heaghney, who are in their mid-thirties and early forties, at their AQM studio in Burlington’s Old North End. In some ways, she said, “what I wrote in 2021 still really applies to my life, so it was sort of like my past self was giving me advice.”
But in other ways, her relationship with the music evolved. “A lot of what I wrote lyrically morphed and grew as I grew as a person,” Wilson said. “I’ve definitely tweaked the lyrics to update how my emotions have changed over the years. I might have a song like ‘TO BLAME’ that’s centered on forgiveness, and when I sing it years later I realize, You know what? I’m actually still mad, and it’s really hard to sing this song because I don’t feel that way anymore. It’s a little surreal.”
Wilson’s cancer obviously had a lot to do with the record’s long gestation period. She got a call from the University of Vermont Medical Center in October 2022 following an ultrasound of a lump in her breast. A little over a month later, she was getting a double mastectomy in Los Angeles.
It was a long road to recovery for Wilson, a lifelong dancer as well as a musician. That journey threads through the new record.
“Feeling a little stress / I’m feeling everything,” she sings in a sensuous, ethereal voice on “RUNNING OUT OF TRICKS,” an indie-pop banger with a bubbling synth bass line from Rice and a funky, shuffling beat from Heaghney.
Despite its heavy themes, the record also represents a wonderfully cathartic release, the sound of a band determined not only to persist in the face of hardship but also to sing and dance through it. Not all of those difficulties revolved around Wilson’s health.
“Frankly, all the work you do after you finish a record has been more challenging than the actual writing and recording process,” Rice said from where he sat on a studio couch with Wilson and Heaghney, who are married.
The record has been in the can for a while now, but as Rice admitted, the band members spent a lot of time and money finishing it. They were unhappy with the first mastering job and had it redone. Then they discovered it would need to be remastered again for vinyl.
“It was honestly a nightmare pulling it all together,” Rice said. “We had multiple moments where we almost pulled all of our music from streaming services and just said, ‘Hey, if you want it, just buy a record.’”
Heaghney was quick to point out that, for all the turmoil of finishing the record, there were many moments of celebration.
“The first time we listened to the mix, the first time we got the mastered version we liked, then getting the actual vinyl in our hands … those were all big moments for us,” he recalled. “It’s hard to describe how satisfying it feels to hold your own record.”
“Yeah, we’re all millennials; we still love the format of a full record,” Rice added.
From its conception, the full-length LP was meant to be listened to from opener “THIS IS REAL” to final track “CAUGHT UP.” That kind of flow is often difficult to achieve, as if the band has presented a 41-minute piece of music that just so happens to be split into 10 tracks.
The record pulses with Wilson’s gorgeously powerful voice and the band’s space-age funkiness. It is a slick, gloriously analog-sounding collection of lovingly crafted compositions, aided by producer and Burlington DJ SnakeFoot, aka Ross Travis. Live, the trio is more than capable of reinterpreting the songs, a force of new-age soul, throbbing funk and genre-blurring electronica. But its members admit that without Travis, the record might have been well shorter than its 10 tracks.
“Ross saved us a few times, for sure,” Rice said. “We would hit walls on some of the songs and get really frustrated, but then he’d send the tracks back with little bits of added percussion or some synth samples and ambient sound swells, and suddenly we were dancing around the studio.”
It’s a record the band is immensely proud of but simultaneously ready to move beyond. There won’t be a big supporting tour this year, as Rice will be in Japan for most of October and Wilson and Heaghney often travel south in the winter in their converted camper van.
That doesn’t mean Acqua Mossa aren’t planning a big 2026. A follow-up EP is already “75 percent done,” by Rice’s estimation, and they’ve started writing songs for their sophomore LP, both of which they hope to release next year.
“When you’re 18 years old and have endless energy, it’s easier to just jump in a van and hit the road,” Wilson said of touring. “But where we’re at now, I really like it. We have so much creative juice; we just want to focus on recording more. We’re so ready to go!”
Prior to the Monkey House show, the band had played only sporadic shows, including a secret set at the most recent Otis Mountain Get Down festival in the Adirondacks. But in front of a packed house in Winooski, all the years of health scares and postproduction drudgery melted away as Acqua Mossa stepped into their magnetic power. Wilson commanded the stage, and Heaghney and Rice crafted a shuffling beat and subtle stabs of synth, respectively, as the band moved into the slow-burn funk and soul of “GET OVER YOU.”
“When will I get over you?” Wilson sang, the light show playing across her face.
As I left the club, I was a little sad there wouldn’t be more opportunities to catch the band live again soon — Acqua Mossa put on a hell of a show. But it’s clear that Wilson, Heaghney and Rice are putting their creative energies where they belong. And after spending the first five years of their existence battling their way to a brilliant debut record, they’re intent on picking up the pace.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Something in the Water | Acqua Mossa Dive In”
This article appears in Sept 24-30 2025.
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