Opinion · Culture · The Future of Pop
A Love Letter to Being Human
Static & Signal — Review by Skye Hartley
I’ll be honest — I’m not the kind of person who sits around wondering how songs get made. Same way I don’t ask my favorite Riverwest diner what’s in the cheesecake that tastes like heartbreak and vanilla extract. Some mysteries are better left unsolved.
But when a pre-release of When Code Learned to Feel landed in my Drive, that rule went out the window. I rolled my eyes at the “no pulse, all heart” tagline — pressed play anyway, and pretty soon caught myself sitting up straighter, adjusting my headphones, and actually starting to believe it.
Before we ask if this is a bona fide album, let’s get real — every hit you’ve heard in the last decade has passed through a computer first. Auto-Tune, mastering plugins, stems stitched together at 3 a.m.; the line between human and machine got smudged years ago. BAYSGATE already had everything — the lyrics, the melodies, the production — the bones of it all. What they didn’t have was a voice. So they did what any 2025 romantic would do: opened a laptop and let synthetic singers take the mic. Each voice was generated, tuned, and shaped through code — artificial throats giving human songs their pulse.
Yeah. Every voice is artificial. And somehow, that’s what makes it feel so painfully human.
That’s the paradox BAYSGATE live in — code built to mimic feeling ends up out-feeling half the charts. And then the songs start proving it.
The record kicks off with “Shoes,” all jangly alt-pop warmth — American Hi-Fi with a crush. “Bad Girls Never Sleep” slides neon-slick through the night like Charli XCX colliding with Garbage in a retrofitted DeLorean, while “Text STOP STACEY” turns modern romance into street-level anxiety — sharp, wry, and delivered with the precision of a passive-aggressive screenshot.
Then there’s “Varsity Sins.” On the surface, a disposable cheerleader-crush anthem in the same wheel tracks as Hanson or Wheatus — but in two and a half minutes it does what whole indie-rock careers chase: pure, effortless joy wrapped in immaculate hooks. And then that’s it — gone, off to the next genre before you’ve even caught your breath. It’s ridiculous. It’s impressive. The video would explode.
When BAYSGATE lean soft, “The Backup Princess” flips the Disney formula on its jeweled head — a cracked-crown anthem with guitar grit and unapologetic grace. “Clara’s Dream” carries that Mazzy Star glow — slow, cinematic, quietly devastating. “Lollipop” spins pure early-’60s bubblegum joy; “Aurora Gory Alice” goes full heavy-prog rock — all thunderous fretwork and cosmic weight.
Every song feels like its own little universe, stitched together more by emotion than genre.
When Code Learned to Feel doesn’t flex or apologize. It just stares you down and dares you to feel something inconvenient.
Still, you can’t shake the sense that twenty-nine songs leave nowhere to hide, and little room to breathe. It’s easy to be moved; harder to stay moved for nearly two hours. Somewhere between the sharp writing and emotional circuitry, the album starts to feel like a flood when a storm would’ve done. The songs hit hard — lyrically sharp and emotionally fluent — but it’s almost worth approaching this collection as a double album, if only to give the latter half the justice it deserves.
“Good Luck With That” struts with funk-pop payback, and “All About Her” explores a girl-girl crush glowing with genuine K-pop shimmer that Hatsune Miku would be proud of, before gliding into the weary confessions of “Two Voices in the Kitchen,” and the demi-static ache of “Spillways” and “You Would Have Liked Her.”
Then there’s “Better Off as Zombies” — a jazzy, self-aware wink at modern life that hurts more than it should. “Dying for Twenty” closes it out — quiet, merciless, and haunting.
Twenty-nine tracks is a lot.
But so are human emotions.
And maybe that’s the point — machines don’t feel restraint either.
So, was it a bona fide album after all? Maybe not in the traditional sense. But if emotion’s the metric — it’s as real as they come.
Streaming everywhere November 11
About the Writer
Skye Hartley didn’t mean to become a music journalist — she just kept writing about songs until people started sending her promo links. She’s a Milwaukee-based culture writer filing for Static & Signal, runs on caffeine and quiet awe, and maintains a complicated relationship with the replay button.