“I really did love you
And I’m sorry that we couldn’t make it work
I wish you all the best in your life
And I’m sorry for always trying
To see the funny side
It just made everything in my life easier”
This is Headache speaking. At first glance, a curious little passion-project that would sit as a footnote to London born producer Vegyn’s illustrious career. Headache’s second album, Thank You For Almost Everything, was released on Nineteen Sixty Five records in October 2025. Having taken a couple of months to sit with the album, and each of the complex, life-affirming and surreal emotions it elicits, it’s time to talk about it.
The Head Hurts But The Heart Knows The Truth, the project’s debut released in 2023, was astonishing. An incredibly tough act to follow. A dark, melancholic, humorous stream-of-consciousness that swam through the sea of human emotion. It flew slightly under the radar; not entirely surprising for an artist who can often do without the fanfare, but it had a profound effect on a particularly dedicated fanbase. The project marked a significant change of pace from Vegyn’s usual work, including his 2024 album The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions, but even then the flirtations with trip-hop were obvious.
Headache takes those particular ambitions one step further. Poetry and spoken word are being used in increasingly profound and creative ways within electronic music; with the nascent trend having largely emerged through dubstep and electronica instrumentals in the last couple of decades. South London wordsmith James Massiah frequently joins Joy Orbison in the DJ booth, and For Those I Love’s work with Overmono has brought spoken-word onto the dancefloor.
At its outset, artists such as Mike Skinner perfected off-the-cuff, relatable storytelling that was married with jungle and garage beats. More recently, a new age of automation continues to push things forward. Mike Skinner was the everyman, rapping about being skint, getting dumped and battling through life’s mundanities on a comedown. Unflinchingly, undeniably real.
It’s a particularly difficult circle to square that the forlorn wordsmith that fronts “Headache” isn’t real at all. While Vegyn is the man behind the keys, and the poetry is written by an elusive figure named Francis Hornsby Clark, the album is brought to life by a form of AI software. If licensing a vaguely corporate-sounding text-to-speech chatbot sounds like the sort of irredeemable AI slop that will send the music industry hurtling into oblivion, it’s anything but. Vegyn’s production is predictably excellent, but its lyricism makes Headache something transcendental.
“And if you’re still here, remember, I’m not real
And neither are your dreams
And I’m sorry to break it to you
But, if that ever mattered to you at all
It was over for you from the start”
Headache’s sophomore effort strikes a more optimistic tone. It’s every bit as surreal, even more so in parts, but never plumbs the depths that Headache explored a couple of years ago. Still going out on a stretcher, but smiling. Still self-loathing, but loving it. The album kicks off as it means to go on, albeit while taking the scenic route, with the soaring “Nineteen Sixty Five.” It’s a wonderful opener, juxtaposed with the gut-wrenching “Party That Never Ends,” which brought the previous album to a close.
The rest of the record is awash with brighter colours, whimsy and absolute nonsense. Its every bit as surreal as the first, but set in sunnier climates. “Trophy Life” is an excellent slice of trip-hop with strained piano chords, whereas “It Opens If You Turn The Handle” strays further into downtempo. If we’re being picky, the vocals sometimes get lost in the mix and would benefit from being brought to the fore, but these issues are trivial. Where the album has undoubtedly taken further strides is with its use of instrumentals. Given Vegyn’s phenomenal work on the likes of Frank Ocean’s Blonde, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The album closer’s (“Most Undo Tomorrow”) use of guitar is gorgeous, permeating the signature rolling drums and syncs that soundtrack Headache’s musings. The closing track is the album’s most affecting; an ode to the life you hope to live now that the storm clouds have passed. “I will wait for you, and I will smile again, But the world holds, And while my face is pale, it faces the sun.” It’s beautiful prose that rounds off a fantastic album, but on first listen I didn’t think this was quite as groundbreaking as the first.
As a continuation of the first, though, it’s perfect. In much the same way as The Streets “Empty Cans” is a track in two parts, with Skinner’s spirits lifting once Scott offers to take a look at his TV, there’s a similarly uplifting tonal shift when listening to Headache’s records as one complete work. It’s a wonderful counterbalance to the debut’s ruminations on suicide, mortality and nihilism.
For those dismissive souls who will see this as little more than some seemingly random words over the top of an instrumental, then you’re on the cusp of some similarly disappointing realisations about the majority of music produced in human history. Some criticisms will perhaps be more valid; with the use of an AI voiceover depriving a similar talented human actor or musician the chance to participate in the project. In Headache’s case, however, it could easily lose the essence of what makes the project so special. The uncanny valley of the AI voice is all the more surreal, and its pain is so much more relatable because it doesn’t belong to anyone else.
Vegyn has spoken on this exact subject, most pertinently in conversation with Nigel Godrich and Nicolas Godin; as he sat down to discuss his remix of AIR’s “Moon Safari”. The conversation inevitably touched on the Headache project, with Vegyn framing AI as the next in a long line of tools which has pushed the music industry forward. If they’re used by visionary producers with a story to tell, then the collective musical palette will be all the richer for it. The voice on Headache has been loosely ascribed to various upper-class English actors, but that misses the point. The beauty isn’t in how the words are spoken but in how you hear them.
Vegyn was candid about his use of AI to broaden his own musical palette, in much the same way as advancements in production has allowed people to make genre-defining bangers with little more than a laptop. I’d like to think I’d draw the line at anything that was made without any direct human input, but that isn’t a contradiction I’ve had to contend with just yet.
Looking for any sort of deeper meaning in music is a chimera; it exists only where you find it. It means everything and it means nothing. Headache’s new album is as brilliant to some as it is dreadful to others. Electronic music’s use of Artificial Intelligence will launch hundreds of think pieces far more worthy than this one, but the question of where you draw the line is a personal one. Headache’s work has arrived at the bottom of this particular bell-curve, with AI set to become a more prominent feature in the production as well as the distribution of our music. For now, Headache’s music lands in a sweet-spot between man and machine. And to those of you that see fragments of yourselves in this machine’s story, it’s beautiful.