I went looking for the laughs in Mike Sain't Louis's songs and found a map of how we cope

Madrid, 25 October 2026. — I should confess something before I start. When I first came across Mike Sain't Louis, I assumed I'd be laughing the whole way through. Everyone had told me he was the funny one: the Madrid indie alternative artist who calls himself “the first AI singer-songwriter”, who takes the mickey out of his exes, his haters and, cheerfully, himself. And he is funny. But after a few weeks with his catalogue I noticed something odd. In the songs themselves, hardly anyone laughs.

It turns out he'd noticed it too. In a new post on his blog, he goes back through his lyrics looking for laughter and admits he was surprised to find so little of it. Plenty of crying, plenty of rage, plenty of dance floor. The laughs you could count on one hand. But, as he puts it, when they do turn up, they carry weight. None of them is filler.

So I did what he did. I went looking.

First, a quick word on how he works

For anyone new to him: Mike Sain't Louis writes every lyric himself. He is also the composer, producer, art director and CEO of his own independent label, MIKE SAIN'T LOUIS. The music and the vocal performance are created with artificial intelligence, which he directs as a production tool. He doesn't sing; the voice you hear is AI-generated. The words, the ideas and the artistic direction are his. Over roughly two years he has released 273 singles and more than 280 music videos under the banner PLANETA GAYFOLK, all of which you can stream and download for free on his website.

That matters here, because what I was hunting for lives entirely in the writing.

The laugh that heals

I started where he starts, with “Como a mi chihuahua”, one of his shortest lyrics and, I think, one of his tenderest. It opens as a chain of confessions. The narrator keeps saying “let me tell you”, and each time owns up to a different fragility: avoiding the evening news, getting worked up about injustice, switching off from the world, not being able to watch someone else cry, hearing about disasters late, via Twitter, once they've stopped burning.

It's a portrait of someone with very thin skin, someone the world hurts easily, who has learned to protect himself by arriving late to everything painful. Then the song turns to the other person and asks whether they feel it too, whether their heart races when you pass each other, like the pulse of a very small dog.

And then the last line, flagged as something more personal. What cures the isolation, it says, is your laugh: an antidote to my loneliness.

Suddenly the whole list made sense. If the world hurts that much, you need a remedy, and the remedy isn't a pill or an escape. It's the sound of someone laughing nearby.

What struck me most, and Mike points this out himself, is that it isn't a kiss. The song makes clear the kisses never came; the other person got on the bus without giving one, and the lyric uses a very Canarian word for that bus, guagua. There's no returned romance here. Just the company of a laugh. As he notes, an antidote doesn't cure the whole illness. It neutralises one particular poison while it lasts. That's about the most honest description of a crush I've read.

The laugh as a decision

Next stop: “Ni un pimiento”, a song that mixes Spanish proverbs with a very Madrid kind of fury. Its chorus argues that crying over the past isn't worth a pepper, which is the Spanish equivalent of not worth a bean, and immediately offers an alternative: laugh out loud, because the world is marked.

This laugh doesn't arrive from outside. It's a choice. Almost an order the narrator gives himself, or gives us. Mike is very taken with the adverb, and so am I. Not just laugh, but laugh loudly. A laugh that wants to be heard, that takes up room. In the context of a song about an emotional con, he reads it as an act of dignity: whoever laughs like that has stopped crying over someone who didn't deserve it.

I recognised that laugh. Most of us have done it in a pub at some point, slightly too loud, for slightly too long, so nobody would ask.

The smile as a shield

Then “Dark Corners”, which slips between English and Spanish, where the smile stops being a weapon and becomes a shield. If the laugh in “Ni un pimiento” pushes back, this one covers up. It's the polite smile you wear so nobody looks too closely.

His blog post goes further, into a moody moon, an abyss that cackles, a smile put on out of obligation and a grey routine where no one laughs at all. I won't spoil those. Go and read it.

Why this landed for me, here

British humour has always been a coping mechanism: we joke at funerals, we laugh at the worst possible moment, we use irony as armour. Mike Sain't Louis seems to understand that instinct completely, but he also knows when to drop it. There is a purpose under the jokes that he has spoken about openly: with professional support, he turns years of relationships with narcissistic partners into songs, to make psychological abuse visible and help people who've lived through it feel seen and believed. The laughs in his lyrics aren't decoration. They're how people survive.

The photo with this post shows him at night, in a dim flat with the city lit up behind him, not smiling. I think that's exactly right.

Where to listen

Every song mentioned here, with full lyrics, streams and downloads free at https://mikesaintlouis.com. You'll also find him on Spotify, Deezer and the other main platforms. His original post (in Spanish): https://mikesaintlouis.com/blog/un-antidoto-contra-la-soledad-una-carcajada-idiota-y-una-sonrisa-por-compromiso-las-risas-de-planeta-gayfolk

About Mike Sain't Louis

Mike Sain't Louis is an indie alternative artist based in Madrid who describes himself as “the first AI singer-songwriter”. His project PLANETA GAYFOLK is built around a trilogy, “Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado GAYFOLK”, “Ojalá se pudiera viajar a GAYFOLK” and “El día de la liberación”, imagined as one journey to a planet where everyone can live as they are. Cheeky, uncensored and camp, his songs range from electropop to copla, in Spanish and also in English, French and Portuguese. Many listeners found him in 2024, when “Tan Cateto” went viral on TikTok.

Press contact

Email: info@mikesaintlouis.com Website: https://mikesaintlouis.com Instagram: @planetagayfolk