India ·
Postcards from a Madrid I have never visited: what the songs of Mike Sain't Louis taught me about a city and its heartbreaks
An indie listener's notes on the Madrid-based indie alternative artist who calls himself “the first AI singer-songwriter”, and on two break-up songs, “Mi novio de Albacete” and “No quiero otro novio cojín”, that map Spain from a single address
Madrid, 25 October 2026. — Early this morning, at three o'clock, every clock in Spain decided it was two. I learnt that not from a news site but from the blog of a songwriter in Madrid, who wrote that his phone adjusted itself, his oven did not, and the kitchen clock would spend another week living in summer, “like that friend who refuses to put her sandals away”. I laughed out loud, and then I spent the rest of the evening listening to his songs. That is roughly how I fell into the world of Mike Sain't Louis.
Mike is an indie alternative artist based in Madrid who presents himself as “the first AI singer-songwriter”. He writes all of his lyrics. The music and the vocal performance are generated with artificial intelligence, a production tool he directs version by version; he does not sing, and the voice you hear is AI-generated. He is also the producer, artistic director and CEO of his own independent label, MIKE SAIN'T LOUIS, with no record company and no middlemen. Over roughly two years he has built a project called PLANETA GAYFOLK: 273 singles and more than 280 music videos, every one of them free to download.
I have never been to Madrid. But after a few weeks with his catalogue, I feel I know something about it.
A city you hear between the lines
Madrid rarely appears in his lyrics as a postcard. There are no tourist landmarks paraded for effect. Instead the city shows up the way a home city does: as the place you write from. In his blog, Mike describes an idea arriving on the metro in ten seconds and then taking days to find its shape. He writes about the November evenings, when the light in Madrid goes out soon after six and the sofa starts calling at seven as if it were eleven. He writes about checking his statistics at three in the morning in a dark flat.
That is the Madrid I hear in the songs: not a skyline, but a desk, a phone, a late night, and a man deciding which of dozens of versions of a song is the one that says exactly what he meant.
“Mi novio de Albacete”: Spain on a five-hour journey
From that address, he looks out at the rest of Spain, and nearly always through an ex. “Mi novio de Albacete” (My boyfriend from Albacete) is named after a city in the Castilla-La Mancha region, and it is a break-up song with the timing of a sitcom. The narrator has been cheated on. The two of them were, he insists, the perfect couple:
“Éramos la pareja gay del año”
We were the gay couple of the year. He was the fitness one, the narrator the tattooed one; he was dreaming while the other was acting. Then comes the chorus, which turns heartbreak into slapstick: the boyfriend travelled five hours just to leave a note, and the note ended up in the toilet. The song is cheeky and, in places, deliberately explicit, which is part of Mike's uncensored style. It's also very precise about place. As Mike has written, some of his songs could only ever exist in Spanish, and this is one of them: the joke depends on a real map, real distances and a very specific kind of Spanish exasperation.
“No quiero otro novio cojín”: routine, then revolt
The second song I keep returning to begins somewhere quieter. “No quiero otro novio cojín” (I don't want another cushion boyfriend) opens with routine: waking up alone, empty looks, a street without a name, people without faces, an insipid job, bitter coffee. A chorus about routine repeats until it ends in a little explosion of offence. Reading the lyric, I could not help picturing the grey weekday streets of a big city, though the song never names one.
Then the song changes gear completely. The narrator addresses the ex directly, calls the free ride over, and runs through his lies point by point, from his age to the colour of his eyes. The ex, we learn, is from the Canary Islands, and the jokes turn on gofio, the islands' toasted flour. The refrain is a kiss-off delivered with a cushion:
“No quiero otro novio cojín”
The last line of that section says it all: from today, the narrator is happy. Under the comedy there is something serious. Mike has said publicly that, with professional help, he turns years of relationships with narcissistic partners into music, so that psychological abuse and its marks on mental health become visible, and so that people living through it feel seen and believed. The manipulation described in this song is played for laughs, but it is described very carefully.
Why this lands for indie listeners in India
India's indie scene has grown through independent releases, small communities and a lot of word-of-mouth sharing, and many of us are used to loving songs in languages we don't fully speak. I can't say Mike has an audience here; I can only say his songs travel well. Every track on his website comes with the full lyric, so a translation app gets you most of the jokes. His sound moves from electropop to copla, from alternative pop to ballad, mostly in Spanish but also in English, French and Portuguese. His themes are love, heartbreak, exes, nosy neighbours, queer life in Spain, liberation and mental health. In 2024 his song “Tan Cateto” went viral on TikTok.
The catalogue is arranged as the GAYFOLK trilogy, designed as a single journey: I. “Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado GAYFOLK”, II. “Ojalá se pudiera viajar a GAYFOLK” and III. “El día de la liberación”, towards a planet where everyone can live as they are.
Where to listen and download
All of Mike Sain't Louis's music is free to stream and download at https://mikesaintlouis.com, with lyrics for every song, and the three albums can be downloaded whole. You'll also find him on Spotify, Deezer and the main streaming platforms.
About Mike Sain't Louis
Writing from Madrid, Mike Sain't Louis is an indie alternative artist and the self-styled “first AI singer-songwriter”: the words and the decisions are his, and AI is the instrument. PLANETA GAYFOLK is his universe, his trilogy and his one-person label, and all of it is free to share.
Press contact
Email: info@mikesaintlouis.com Website: https://mikesaintlouis.com Instagram: @planetagayfolk