Modern Love Is Automatic

The voice of Mike Score in Modern Love Is Automatic floats over a backdrop of synthesizers mimicking a cosmic hum, as if the future and the past collided in the same measure. He doesn’t sing with the urgency of classic rock but with a robotic cadence that sounds more like a warning than a declaration: human emotion reduced to an eighties algorithm. The song isn’t about love in the traditional sense but about how that feeling is commodified until it becomes indistinguishable from a consumer product. The guitar riff, repetitive and obsessive, acts as a mechanical heartbeat reinforcing the idea that affection is measured in data rather than gestures. The production, with its synthetic echoes and layered choirs, gives the track an air of dystopian prophecy: as if 1981 already knew the century would end dominated by screens and algorithms.

Recorded at Battery Studios in London, the track was born as part of a self-titled EP released that same year under the label Jive Records. Though the song wasn’t a massive hit at the time, it reached number nineteen on the US Dance Club Play chart, sharing space with Telecommunication as a double A-side. Producer Mike Howlett—who also worked on the band’s debut album—gave the recording a cold, almost clinical sheen that contrasts with the warmth of other productions from the era. Engineer Mike Shipley captured every note with a precision that highlights the subtlest details, from Paul Reynolds’s picking to Ali Score’s drum hits. Interestingly, Phil Spector—legend of the *wall of sound*—expressed interest in producing the band’s next work, but a conflict with Jive Records and his gradual withdrawal prevented it. The lyrics, credited to all four members of A Flock of Seagulls, reflect their obsession with the extraterrestrial that permeated their music: there are references to cosmic energies and vampiric figures, as if modern love were a ritual from another galaxy.