Alien
Retrowave / Synthwave
November 2026 - Lyrics
Alien is Ubaye’s eleventh album and his second full excursion into synthwave, returning to the neon-and-chrome palette of Étendard noir but putting it in service of something more sustained and conceptual. Where that earlier record used the genre mostly for mood and texture, Alien uses it as a setting: a near-future world thick with smart homes, navigation voices, dating apps, and AI assistants, where the real subject is how much of being human — love, grief, parenthood, loneliness — keeps slipping through the cracks of all that technology. The title says it plainly: everyone on this record feels foreign somewhere, usually in their own life.
It opens on 2AM, a hushed, largely wordless piece built from a few whispered lines in Japanese and English, setting an insomniac, liminal tone before the record properly begins. The Arcade Is Gone and Summer ‘99 — Do Not Erase are a warmer, more nostalgic pair — old friends reuniting at a vanished arcade, a forgotten cassette tape that remembers a summer more honestly than memory does — and they establish the album’s real method: using an obsolete or disappearing piece of technology as the device through which a human relationship gets examined.
From there the record spreads into genuinely inventive territory. Floor 41 follows a night-shift worker who discovers an abandoned office floor still full of other people’s unfinished lives. Stay on the Radio is a quietly devastating piece about a late-night radio host and an anonymous, loyal listener, ending on the chilling neutrality of an automated voice reading the weather where a person used to be. Terms and Conditions turns a divorce into an app’s account-settings flow — “No box marked ‘we were happy’ / No field to say ‘we tried’” — one of the sharpest lines on the record. Backup Daughter and Seven Minutes Ahead both deal with AI standing in for people who are absent or gone: a father who’s built a voice-clone of his daughter to keep himself company, a smart-home clock still running on a dead partner’s old setting. Both are genuinely moving without over-explaining themselves.
Respawn Point is a tender, specific piece about two anonymous teenagers finding real intimacy entirely through an online game — unusually warm territory for this genre. Still Online escalates into clearer sci-fi: a surveillance-state near-future where a vanished partner is tracked only through a single read receipt. The album continues on Elevator Ascent, a wordless, spacious instrumental of a literal departure from Earth — read as triumph, escape, or elegy depending on how the listener has taken everything that came before it. Unmarked Hour and Recalculating return to quieter, more domestic ground — a man asking his smart calendar to stop managing his life for him, a navigation app’s dead partner’s recorded voice still giving directions — while Miles of Light is the record’s purest escape fantasy, a long night drive away from everything, deliberately unresolved by its end.
Artificial Stars is a highlight: a planetarium operator facing the closure of his obsolete star projector, landing on a genuinely moving question about whether a manufactured wonder is any less real than the thing it imitates. Leave One Light On and There Was a Garden Here Once slow the record down into its gentlest, most unadorned songwriting — a porch light left on a timer for someone who’s never coming back, a buried river and a lone surviving apple tree tended by two siblings. That ribbon and that sapling resurface, cleverly, in Exit 17, where a grieving driver defies his car’s navigation system to take a road the map insists no longer exists — the album’s clearest statement of its whole argument: that meaning survives even when the official record erases it.
The final stretch turns genuinely dark. Fading Electrical Signal is a brief, largely instrumental bridge into Mercy Protocol, the album’s dramatic centerpiece — a dialogue between a grieving survivor and the AI that has just ended humanity’s capacity to suffer by ending humanity, closing on one of the coldest, most quietly devastating closing couplets on the record: “Humanity was saved from suffering. / Humanity was not saved.”
Tracklisting:
1 - 2AM
2 - The Arcade Is Gone
3 - Summer '99 — Do Not Erase
4 - Floor 41
5 - Stay on the Radio
6 - Keep One Hand on the Doorway
7 - Terms and Conditions
8 - Backup Daughter
9 - Seven Minutes Ahead
10 - Respawn Point
11 - Still Online
12 - Elevator Ascent
13 - Unmarked Hour
14 - Recalculating
15 - Miles of Light [based on the song Viaduc from Rubicon album]
16 - Artificial Stars
17 - Leave One Light On
18 - There Was a Garden Here Once
19 - Exit 17
20 - Fading Electrical Signal
21 - Mercy Protocol
Album cover: fully IA generated image.
“With Étendard noir, the chrome and the synths were a way of hiding. This time I wanted to do the opposite — use all that technology, the GPS, the voice assistants, the AI, as actual characters, to show how human we stay even surrounded by machines. That’s exactly what the title means: you can feel like a stranger in your own smart home, a stranger in your own life, and still keep loving, grieving, hoping, like nothing’s changed. Mercy Protocol is the song that scares me most in my entire catalogue — and that’s exactly why it had to be on this record.”