There are songs that bop, songs that haunt – and then there’s Spiritual Viagra, the NEO 10Y anthem about gay love that has ignited one of the most intense corners of the internet: the Heated Rivalry fandom. Fans of the series have fallen hard for the track, stitching it under TikToks and Twitter/X edits of Shane and Ilya’s most intimate moments. The obsession makes perfect sense – the lyrics feel uncannily like the way Shane and Ilya first met, a mix of cosmic pull, instant chemistry, and emotional disarmament that fans can’t stop replaying.

A Song Built for Love Energy – Literally

NEO 10Y released Spiritual Viagra as a sensual, spiritual, electronic-pop fusion – a song explicitly about love energy, instant connection, and the kind of attraction that feels like a metaphysical event.

The song describes a moment charged with destiny: eyes locking, bodies reacting before minds can catch up, and a rush of eroticism fused with emotional recognition. This blend of vulnerability and erotic charge mirrors the Heated Rivalry meet-cute to an eerie degree, which is why fans say the lyrics feel like they were written for Shane and Ilya.

On social platforms, creators layer scenes – the gym moments, the lingering looks, the emotionally fraught silences – over the most rapturous lines. Suddenly, the show plays like a music video for the track.

NEO 10Y’s Real-Life Love Story Behind the Song

Spiritual Viagra was famously born out of NEO 10Y’s own love-at-first-sight moment. The artist has described meeting their now-partner and feeling an overwhelming, instantaneous connection – the exact kind of soul-collision that became the backbone of the song.

The lyrics are spiritual but erotic, poetic but physical – an invocation of a person who changes you in a moment. That authenticity gives the song a magnetic emotional charge. It’s why fans say it feels like stepping into Shane’s POV the second he sees Ilya and realizes he’s doomed.

How the Song Went Viral Across TikTok and Twitter/X

Clips of Heated Rivalry had already been circulating, but pairing them with Spiritual Viagra pushed them into another dimension of virality. TikTok creators use the track for:

• slow-burn edits
• “how they met” recaps
• POV montages
• reaction videos
• cinematic-style fan cuts

Meanwhile, on X/Twitter, fans cut the show’s steamiest scenes into dramatic, stylized music videos set to the track. Those edits get reposted, re-edited, and repurposed, creating a looping storm of content where the song is now inseparable from the ship.

Fans Say the Lyrics Are Shane and Ilya

The connection isn’t superficial – fans map specific lyrics to specific moments in the show. The song’s language of transcendence, surrender, and consuming attraction aligns perfectly with how the characters circle each other, fight their feelings, and eventually give in.

To the fandom, Spiritual Viagra doesn’t just fit – it narrates.

And Now: “Dopamine” Is Becoming the Other Heated Rivalry Anthem

As if one NEO 10Y song wasn’t enough, fans have recently turned their attention to Dopamine, another track from the artist’s catalog that has exploded across Heated Rivalry TikTok and Twitter edits.

Where Spiritual Viagra is cosmic and romantic, Dopamine is sexy – pulsing, breathy, dripping with hunger and tension. The production is minimalist and intimate, with a kind of slow, grinding urgency that listeners say feels like Shane trying (and failing) not to think about Ilya’s body.

The Lyrics Fans Are Losing Their Minds Over

Dopamine leans heavily into themes of:

• pleasure
• craving
• addiction to someone’s presence
• the overpowering need for physical closeness

Lines about craving release, losing control, or becoming chemically hooked on another person’s energy hit especially hard in the context of Heated Rivalry’s sexual tension.

Fans jokingly – but passionately – say the song sounds like:

“Shane trying to act normal while thinking about Ilya’s dick.”

It’s the kind of track that feels made for scenes where the characters are pretending they’re not affected when they very much are.

Why “Dopamine” Works So Well for Shane/Ilya Edits

• It’s slow and sensual, perfect for lingering-glance videos.
• Its erotic tension matches the “enemies but also undressing each other with their eyes” dynamic.
• The chorus has a desperate, need-you-now quality that fans interpret as Shane’s internal monologue whenever he gets within three feet of Ilya.

If Spiritual Viagra is about cosmic love, Dopamine is about pure, visceral want – making it the perfect companion soundtrack for the couple.

Together, the Two Songs Are Defining the Fandom’s Aesthetic

With Spiritual Viagra capturing the emotional connection and Dopamine capturing the sexual tension, NEO 10Y has without intending to – become the musical voice of the Shane/Ilya fandom.

Two songs, two energies, one ship. A cute viral TikTok post has even emerged showing NEO 10Y and his partner as the original couple that Spiritual Viagra was about.

Their edits, playlists, TikToks, and Twitter/X montages have fused the tracks into the DNA of the fandom narrative. For many fans, the songs now are Shane and Ilya: their longing, their chemistry, their story.

The post How “Spiritual Viagra” Became the Unofficial Heated Rivalry Soundtrack; and Why Fans Are Now Jumping on “Dopamine” Too appeared first on KIMU.

NEO 10Y’s hit Dopamine is having a resurgence. It is often described as an ecstatic anthem of self-liberation and pleasure. Beneath its shimmering synths and seductive delivery, however, lies a layered text about queer sexuality – specifically, the dynamics of desire, surrender, and bottoming. Through repetition, invocation, and sensory imagery, the song reframes the biological drive for dopamine as a spiritual and erotic quest for connection, control, and transcendence.

The Biology of Pleasure as Erotic Language

The title Dopamine” references the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure, reward, and motivation. In NEO 10Y’s lyrics this chemical becomes a metaphor for both love and sex – a craving not just for physical touch but for validation and release. When the chorus pleads,

“Don’t be mean, give me my dopa-dopamine / I can’t be me without my dopa-dopamine,”
the demand operates on two simultaneous registers: a neurochemical need and an explicitly erotic yearning. The repeated imperatives — “give me,” “I need you” — replicate the cyclical urgency of desire: bodily, insistent, and embodied.

Read through a sexual lens, this very insistence is a bottom’s script: the reinforcement of dependency, the articulation of trust in being the receptive party. The cry for dopamine is thus not abstract; it is a call for embodied exchange.

A Central Lyric: Explicit Consent and Erotic Presence

Crucially, the lyric “I love it baby when you’re still inside of me…” crystallizes the song’s sexual specificity. Far from metaphor alone, this line names penetration and the enjoyment of being in the receptive role. In an academic reading, the line performs several functions simultaneously:

1. Literal Sexual Content: The line plainly references ongoing penetration – an affirmation of pleasure derived from being “inside,” which aligns directly with bottoming as a physical and erotic practice.
2. Consent and Pleasure: The phrase “I love it” frames the act as consensual and affirmative. This is not a depiction of coerced vulnerability; instead, it is an embrace of erotic surrender, insisting that submission is pleasurable and agentive.
3. Temporal Emphasis – “Still Inside”: The adverb “still” emphasizes duration and lingering presence. It suggests not only immediate stimulation but a sustained state of being held, attended to, and completed by another – a relational intimateness that ties erotic sensation to emotional closeness, and also semen.
4. Identity and Selfhood: The line helps to anchor earlier proclamations — “I can’t be me without my dopamine” – by linking selfhood to erotic receptivity. The speaker’s sense of self is shown to depend, in part, on being allowed to occupy a receptive, bottoming role that is desired by both parties.

By naming penetration explicitly, the lyric collapses any purely metaphorical reading and insists on a sexual materiality that is both ecstatic and relational.

Power Dynamics and the Performance of Vulnerability

Earlier verses mix neuroscience and technology with erotic imagery:

“Wide eyes and love give me your technology / Synapse control and faking all your hurt for me.”

The “synapse control” motif reads as metaphor for erotic power exchange — the ways one partner can modulate another’s sensations. Crucially, the line about loving “when you’re still inside of me” reframes that power exchange as mutual and desirable. The bottom’s relinquishing of control becomes a form of erotic authorship: the act of being penetrated is not passive erasure but an active, voiced preference.

Moreover, the admission of “faking all your hurt for me” gestures toward role-play and enacted emotion. This complicates the dynamic by making visible the performative dimensions of sexual scenes, where apparent asymmetry is often negotiated and mutually constructed.

Queer Spirituality and the Sacred Body

NEO 10Y frequently fuses erotics with spirituality, and “Dopamine” continues this trajectory. The pursuit of chemical euphoria is cast as a quest for self-realization. The lyric about loving someone “still inside of me” transforms sexual penetration into a vehicle for transcendence: being held within another becomes a metaphoric and literal site of communion. In this register, bottoming functions analogously to devotional practices – a voluntary dissolution of ego into a shared experience that produces catharsis and identity affirmation.

This reconceptualization pushes back against reductive moral binaries that read submission as weakness. Instead, it frames surrender as deliberate, ecstatic, and generative of meaning.

Sonic Representation of Release

Musically, “Dopamine” mirrors its thematic content. The pulsing low end, layered synth beds, and ascending vocal lines emulate waves of arousal and the peaks and plateaus of neurochemical reward. NEO 10Y’s breathy, intimate vocal timbre often blurs the border between singing and moaning: a stylistic choice that reinforces the interdependence of prayerful language and erotic utterance. The repetition of the chorus —- especially when paired with the explicitness of “I love it baby when you’re still inside of me” – creates a cyclical feedback loop between lyric and sound, desire and fulfilment.

Conclusion: Pleasure as Political and Poetic

By framing dopamine – the molecule of reward – as both a physiological necessity and a spiritual, erotic need, NEO 10Y positions queer pleasure as politically and poetically meaningful. The song asserts that desire, including submissive or bottoming desire, is not deviant or incapacitating but rather a legitimate mode of self-expression and community. The explicit line “I love it baby when you’re still inside of me” is decisive: it anchors the song’s metaphors in flesh and consent, insisting that surrender can be chosen, pleasurable, and transformative.

“Dopamine” thus becomes more than a pop track about craving; it is an invocation of connection through vulnerability, an ode to the erotic possibilities of bottoming, and a reminder that release – chemical, emotional, spiritual – can be the truest form of self-realization.

The post “Give Me My Dopamine”: Queer Desire, Submission, and Euphoria in NEO 10Y’s Dopamine appeared first on KIMU.

If you didn’t know already, Tom Ford has a Men’s Grooming Private Suite downstairs in the Covent Garden store and you can experience a range of services from a Beard Trim to a Luxury Facial – all at fairly reasonable prices, considering it is Tom Ford! You can head to www.tomfordbeauty.co.uk for bookings.

The series was shot all over the space, providing a futuristic backdrop for the images – of course. We also brought my Flying V guitar down, which fitted in seamlessly with the shiny black surfaces in the Tom Ford space.

Here’s a full transcript of the interview:

NEO 10Y talks music, cannabis and being gender non-binary

The fashion-designer-turned musician has rediscovered his voice 

Musician, visual artist, fashion designer, yogi and cannabis advocate are just a few of the ways Nik Thakkar describes himself, but he’d probably rather you call him by his stage name: NEO 10Y.

Thakkar’s cerebral approach to his science-inspired moniker sets the tone for the artist’s musical repertoire, which he explains is full of “self realisation” and a mission to understand “the bigger picture of our existence” – all accompanied by high concept visuals and Thakkar’s dreamlike vocals.

The past few years appear to have been full of self-discovery for Thakkar, who after nearly a decade has returned to music. With an aesthetic honed by his previous life as a fashion designer for Ada + Nik, his non-binary identity and his conscious approach to politics, life and everything in between, Thakkar’s work challenges the norm with explicit lyrics and controversial visual imagery – some of which has resulted in death threats.

With fans like Tom Ford and more falling under NEO 10Y’s spell, we spoke to Thakkar about what it means to be non-binary, Internet trolls and worshipping the “divine female.”

Your stage name NEO 10Y is inspired by a phrase in biological science, can you explain why you chose it?

“When I started making songs as NEO 10Y, I was inspired by a vigilante super hero version of myself and because I had done a lot of work under my birth name, I felt like I wanted an evolution. I found the word neoteny in biology which means the retention of childhood characteristics in adulthood, which when you translate it to a spiritual sense, it’s the idea of leading with your heart open and the lack of judgement and systemic oppression you have when you are a kid. 

It’s also really cool that it has N.T. within it, and is digitized to the number 10 which, if you think about the universe in 1s and 0s, represents the a sense of completeness in binary code.” 

You gave up on music for nearly a decade, what led you to go back?

“I actually lost out on a music scholarship at school, and it definitely left me stunted. Also at that time there was never a place for an artist like me. I’m really grateful of the digital evolution of music and the democratisation of creative license in the space, because that’s how I can still be in charge off my own voice, aesthetic, vision and message. 

When I learnt piano as a kid, I was taught to essentially do piano recitals, but it felt too robotic to me and I didn’t identify with that part of the process. I went on to teach myself the guitar, which I played open mic nights on and off for a while but it wasn’t until three years ago that I felt I was in a place where I had a voice and valid message to share real songs with.”

Your concept film The Kid That Killed Trump drew a lot of ire when it dropped and resulted in death threats. Did you know when you were creating it that it would court controversy?

“I knew what I was doing… to an extent. I did it anonymously because I was legitimately scared of potential political repercussions because no one had expressed this visually yet – and it was before he was even president. Kathy Griffin and Snoop Dogg and countless others came afterwards, which only proves group consciousness and the public sentiment.

The death threats are just social media having a field day and you have to kind of laugh it off. Internet trolls are part and parcel of this entertainment reality… the anti vegan comments I get are worse half the time!”

There’s been a lot of discussion about what it means to be non-binary, especially following Sam Smith’s announcement earlier this year. As a non-binary individual yourself, are there any common misconceptions you’ve come across? 

“For me, non binary is a very spiritual and innate sense of understanding that we are all comprised of male and female energies. For me personally, I worship the divine female as much as I possibly can in the physical world that we live in, but I am not trans as I do not have gender dysphoria. 

Even though I am in a male body, my spirit does not subscribe to gender norms and I think that if everyone acknowledged their non binary nature, we would generate a lot more peace and equality in the world. 

A common misconception about non binary individuals is that some type of wardrobe or physical world change is required.  It is simply a spiritual state of understanding the fluidity of gender within yourself.

We will not see a reduction in toxic masculinity if cis het males think that being non binary and accepting their female energy means that they need to change their physical appearance. Gen Z are all woke, queer, non binary, pansexuals in the making, so there’s hope yet!”

Beyond music, you’ve worked in the fashion industry for brands including Louis Vuitton and Jean Paul Gautier and had your own fashion brand Ada + Nik – does fashion still play a big role in your creative life?

“Personal style definitely does! I love expression through uniqueness and iconography, and if anything, designing my own wardrobe with Ada + Nik for four years definitely helped elevate that for me. I am so grateful to have such amazing creative friends around me. Ada is slaying with Ada Zanditon Couture, she dressed Ariana [Grande] for the God Is A Woman video and we still collaborate on shoots.

Personally, I am at a stage where I am really happy creating ethereal constructs through songs, visuals and live shows. I think a lot about our impact on the planet and so I’m not currently putting anything physical out there at this stage, but who knows. I still work with brands that I respect. I love Tom Ford [the accompanying shoot was groomed by Tom Ford Beauty at their concept store in Covent Garden] and he’s vegan now too, which really sets the bar for the future of the industry, a really exciting time.”

What’s next?

“I am in the studio at the moment working on some new tracks for later this year. I just filmed a mini documentary with BBC Ideas, and I am doing more consciousness work – ‘vodcasts’, talks and guest lectures. I am also working with the healing power of plants, particularly cannabis, which is finally becoming more available in the UK.”

So weed and music for the rest of 2019 – iconic!’ 

The post ES Insider, with Tom Ford Beauty appeared first on KIMU.

Two years ago, when I was at a creative crossroads in my life, I started a music project in secret, NEO 10Y. I didn’t have any expectations, it literally started with one song and has rippled from there. Today, I have an audio-visual double release for Dopamine (the single) and Poems To Fuck To – a more personal track which you could call a b-side to some extent, I just wanted to release it in an old school fashion.

I’ve evolved so much as a humxn and artist through living this hyper-reality, refining my craft, movement, voice, guitar, piano and performing live (I played a show in LA last month). I’ve broken 1 million streams and created global social impact because of my unapologetic and political stance through my visuals and writing, which is really all that I could ask for.

This is the first time that I have ever felt like I have real purpose on this planet. I have made Dopamine for everyone, and its meaning is rooted in the idea of finding yourself so that we can collectively, through group consciousness, find world peace. ALSO IT SLAPS. Poems To Fuck To is a more personal track because I wanted to show a more raw side of my artistry but both are interconnected lyrically and spiritually. Will make sure to share the press where I talk about this in detail.

A massive thank you to everyone who has supported me with this movement, you know who you are, I know you believe in me because you believe in yourself. Enjoy the videos and make sure to stream the songs and add them to your Spotify and Apple playlists.

Thank you to Ava Fersi for shooting the artwork, I am honoured to work with you and to Achraf Amiri for the design and illustration bringing to life the idea of the three graces, and “now there’s three of us” lyric from Poems To Fuck To and the construct of the id, ego and superego. I love you both.

Thank you to Alex Lord, my brother Oz Thakkar and Dan Ellyot aka Diangular for your cinematography skills on the videos and bae Josh Haigh for playing my body double in the middle of the night in Greenwich tunnel. I love you all so much.

Finally, Sebastian Bartz for making Dopamine sound like the most expensive track in the history of humanity and for tirelessly mixing it until it ended up at Grammy award winning mix levels, and to Selah Blessed One for his skills on Poems To Fuck To. You’re both incredible talents and I am honoured to work with you.

The post NEO 10Y: Dopamine // Poems To Fuck To appeared first on KIMU.