It’s All So Beautifully Modern: Headache / Vegyn’s Thank You for Almost Everything (2025)

The album opens with a bouncy, joyfully skittering electronic beat – one that seems like it should accompany an endless montage of beautiful people having fun… Then, a familiar, stilted English voice begins to narrate. From cereal to the stars in the sky. From the big issues to the small. The Lotto numbers. Various gems of clear-sighted brilliance. ‘We smoke 5.2 trillion cigarettes a year. Are you honestly trying to tell me that we couldn’t manage a few more?’ 

Oh yeah, Headache is back.

Little is really known about the Headache project, which appeared out of the blue two years ago with The Head Hurts but the Heart Knows the Truth (2023). It’s produced and masterminded by Vegyn, an established figure in the London electronic scene. The lyrics are spoken by an AI voice performing as ‘Headache’, inspired by the absurdity of Internet text-to-speech memes. With AI’s alarmingly rapid move towards cultural domination over the last few years, perhaps Vegyn might face more flack for this creative choice in 2025. 

But really, Headache is nothing like the sinister AI-produced songs sneaking into Spotify playlists. The project engages with modern technology in a knowing, playfully provocative manner. On the brashly nihilistic track ‘Dodge This!’, Headache comments on apocalypse: ‘Even if you could escape it, why would you want to? It’s all so beautifully modern.’ Even the album cover image – soaring birds that transform into a broken chain – evokes a popular TikTok comment reaction image of broken chains in silhouette, usually used in some kind of ironic sense. It is, as Headache says, ‘beautifully modern’.

Headache’s lyrics are supposedly written by a poet named Francis Hornby Clark – although the existence of Clark is up for debate too. In an interview with Crack magazine, Vegyn claimed, ‘Yeah, he just doesn’t have Instagram’. But the fundamentally tongue-in-cheek nature of the project – especially alongside Headache’s persona as a posh, out-of-touch English man – does make ‘Francis Hornby Clark’ sound quite made-up… I love a music project with some mythology around it, so I hope the truth isn’t revealed too soon.

This new album, Thank You for Almost Everything (2025), continues Headache’s previous focus on spoken-word vocals – mostly extended storytelling with little refrain or repetition that might resemble a ‘chorus’. The voice and its strange tonal quality is transfixing – you find yourself hanging on to every word – but there’s also so much beautiful texture in the instrumentals. 

Vegyn has a visionary ear for the interaction between sound and lyric. I was already awed this year by his Blue Moon Safari (2025), a remix of Air’s Moon Safari (1998) that lifts and dances with the original, in a way that never feels imposing or fragmentary. The same subtle mastery of electronic beats is at play here on Thank You for Almost Everything – from the soft shuffled drum beat and muted melody on the reflective ‘I Appreciate You’, to uplifting Air-esque electronic guitar on ‘The Joy Is Ours’. 

Headache is never entirely joyful, but he’s not miserable for long, either. The album spans an impressive contrast between an immense sense of natural gratitude (‘There are many different types of fruit, which are somehow basically all delicious’), subversive individualism (‘What matters to me is love, art and money’), and occasional dashes of pure terror (‘My electricity bill is going up, and we are all going to die’). It’s a delicate balance of irony and sincerity, but it resonates with the bizarre onslaught of contradictory information that the Internet keeps in our pockets at all times.

While the lyrics are often absurd, they’re not purely silly. On the mellow closing track ‘Most Undo Tomorrow’, Headache muses, ‘I used to say that green was an unnatural colour. What was I thinking? Green is the colour of nuclear waste.’ While Headache quickly moves onto cigarettes again (a favourite topic), there’s a keen sense of background melancholy expressed through the frequent references to consumerism, waste and destruction. A mournful, reverberating melody permeates the downtempo drum rhythm. The sonic landscape never dissolves into total misery, but there’s an overcast feeling to this track that never quite goes away.

Vegyn’s instrumentals don’t always complement the lyrics in the most obvious way, either. Sometimes, they are so upbeat that the darker lyrics are hardly noticed on an initial listen. Elsewhere, they fall away to cast a bold emphasis on the lyrics – and not always in the places you might expect. In an age of dwindling attention span, I appreciate this daring obliqueness: not everything needs to be clear and accessible for people who are only half listening.

Words by Rowan Morrow