I wrote quite recently on Headache's The Head Hurts but the Heart Knows the Truth. I thought it was just a one-off collaboration between Vegyn and somewhat mysterious poet Francis Hornsby Clark, so I was pretty surprised when I saw another album had dropped without much fanfare.

Thank You for Almost Everything is very much a continuation of the previous album, and has many of the same elements. The absurd poetry, read by a disembodied AI-generated voice, over Vegyn's signature warm trip-hop. But there is an evolution. The poetry is still irreverent, but overall feels more serious. The topics are the same: self doubt, love, the absurdity of life, but there's an air of existentialism that was less present on the debut.

Perhaps that's thanks to the wider array of organic sounds. Guitar plucks and bowed strings take centre stage throughout the record. Headache has always felt like a statement on the slow melding of technology and man. A synthetic voice talking, in first person, about uniquely human experiences, yet garbled and confused as if a dream, the aesthetic of a free-association-LLM-hallucination.

A lot has happened between 2023 and today; the hope of the internet as an emancipatory, revolutionary technology has all but disappeared as tech companies and governments vandalise the open web with AI slop and racist bots. And yet we are more dependant on it than ever. This growing organic sound, then, feels like a statement. The bionic dreams of the 80s and 90s have, in a way, manifested, but not as intended. Headache is defined by the robot, but it couldn't exist without the human.