Reino Unido ·
Never Two Exes in a Row: A Week Listening to Mike Sain't Louis in the Order He Intended
With 273 singles released in about two years, the Madrid indie alternative artist who calls himself “the first AI singer-songwriter” treats the running order as a form of writing. One listener tested the theory, shuffle button firmly switched off
MADRID, 25 October 2026 — I confess I began the wrong way round. Like most people, I first heard Mike Sain't Louis out of context: a single clip, a catchy line, then whatever the algorithm decided I might like next. It was only after reading a recent post on his blog, about the order in which he releases his songs, that I realised I had been listening to someone who considers sequence a kind of authorship. So I started again, properly, and kept a diary.
Mike Sain't Louis is an indie alternative artist based in Madrid who presents himself as “the first AI singer-songwriter”. He writes every lyric, composes and produces, and runs his own independent label, MIKE SAIN'T LOUIS, with no record company behind him. The music and the vocal performance are generated with artificial intelligence; the words, the concept and the art direction are his. In roughly two years he has put out 273 singles. At that volume, he argues, the order stops being a matter of emptying a folder.
Day one: the rule about exes
His first rule is almost domestic. If one song is about an ex, the next one shouldn't be. He writes a great deal about former boyfriends, he admits freely, as well as gay love, pride, self-esteem and ordinary life. Line three ex songs up and the listener concludes he has nothing else on his mind. “Maybe for those few days I didn't,” he writes, “but there's no need for it to show.”
Listening in sequence, I noticed it quickly. A song soaked in humour gave way to something more bruised; something rooted in the neighbourhood, like “La vecina cotilla”, his ode to the nosy woman next door, was followed by something far more private. The effect is less like an album and more like a week of someone's life, with its mood swings intact.
Day three: hot, warm and cold
He has a word for what he is balancing, and it is temperature. Some songs are hot: you laugh out loud. Some are warm, with a joke that leaves a residue. A few are cold, and the joke almost disappears. Three cold ones in a row and people drift away, he reckons. Nothing but hot ones and he becomes a comedian with a backing track, which he very much does not want to be.
By midweek I could feel the thermostat being adjusted. It is a strange pleasure, sensing a hand on the dial. He knows the risk: mixing temperatures can look like having no clear line. “But the mix is my line,” he says. “Camp and copla, the laugh that cracks a little. If I sort it into blocks, I lose it.”
Day four: the door called “Tan Cateto”
Then there is the moment the order stopped being entirely his. In 2024 “Tan Cateto” went viral on TikTok, and suddenly people were arriving with that one song in their heads and no idea who he was. Whatever they heard next would decide whether they stayed.
He took a lesson from it. When a song lands, the one after carries extra responsibility. It needn't sound similar, but it has to live up to the door people came through. The odd part, he notes, is that the next song was already finished long before any of that happened. What changes is the order, not the song.
Day five: the trilogy, in sequence or not at all
With singles he plays. With the GAYFOLK trilogy he does not. “Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado GAYFOLK”, “Ojalá se pudiera viajar a GAYFOLK” and “El día de la liberación” go in that order and no other: one story in three acts, from discovering a place where you can be who you are, to longing to get there, to the day you finally break free.
Start with the third and nothing terrible happens; the songs make sense. But something is lost. Liberation weighs more once you have been through the waiting. He compares it to reading the last page of a novel first: you can, but you rob yourself. All three albums download free, without registration, at mikesaintlouis.com/descargas, and when people ask where to begin, he tells them the first one.
Day seven: the honest bit
What I liked most about his post was the admission at the end of it. He thinks enormously about order, and he knows a good share of listeners hear him on shuffle, or via a platform's recommendation, or jump from a year-old track found in a short video straight to something released last week.
So why bother? His provisional answer is that the order is not for everyone. It is for the people who follow him release by release, a minority but the ones he cares about most. For everyone else, each song has to stand on its own, which is why he works on each one as if it were the only one. Both things at once, even when they contradict each other. “I don't know if I always manage it,” he writes. After a week, I think he mostly does.
Why it matters to British listeners
Britain has a long love affair with the running order: the carefully sequenced album, the B-side that rewards the devoted, the mixtape made for one person. Mike Sain't Louis applies that old craft to a modern, single-by-single release model, and to a queer, uncensored, funny body of work that moves from electropop to ballads. His songs are mostly in Spanish, with others in English, French and Portuguese, which makes the experiment surprisingly easy to join from here.
Where to listen
Everything is free to stream and download at https://mikesaintlouis.com, where each song has its own page with lyrics. Nothing is sold. He is also on Spotify, Deezer and the other main platforms. The original post is on his blog: https://mikesaintlouis.com/blog/el-orden-en-que-saco-mis-canciones-y-por-que-no-es-casualidad
About Mike Sain't Louis
Madrid-based Mike Sain't Louis describes himself as an indie alternative artist and “the first AI singer-songwriter”. Lyricist, composer, producer, art director and CEO of the independent label MIKE SAIN'T LOUIS, he has built PLANETA GAYFOLK, a catalogue of 273 singles and more than 280 music videos, without intermediaries. Working with professional support, he turns years of relationships with narcissistic partners into songs, to make psychological abuse visible and help those living through it feel seen and believed.
Press contact: info@mikesaintlouis.com · https://mikesaintlouis.com · Instagram @planetagayfolk