4 English vocal synth songs I've had on loop in February 2026
Some time soon, I'd like to post a bigger thing that would serve as an introduction to Vocaloid and vocal synth culture, and showcase a bunch of the fandom's most iconic songs I've obsessed over throughout my history with it. But while that bigger post idea is taking its time coming together, I feel like I need to just write a one-off recommendation post on some English vocal synth songs that were stuck in my brain back in February, before this becomes way too much in the past and I lose the momentum.
So without any kind of additional preamble or explanation for now, here we go.
Become Your Heart
by Du Du Danyon, feat Kasane Teto (SynthV) and Adachi Rei (UTAU)
Sometimes in your life you just need a hard to follow but beautifully illustrated sapphic romance between a chimera and a robot. My first watch of this one left me somewhat confused but starry-eyed at how much I liked its vibes and its collaborative music video - with two illustrators for our protagonists' two points of view. Subsequently having the song on loop really cemented it as one of those pieces of art that made my month of February.
Additionally, while I knew that Teto was a chimera1 (as decided through a vote when the character was initially put together as an April Fool parody of Vocaloids back in 2008), I had little knowledge on Adachi Rei at the time. This helped me realize that the latter was, contrary to (most)2 other voicebanks, not made based on human voice samples but entirely generated by a bunch of sine waves in Audacity3. While I still struggle to appreciate her voice texture part of the time (notably in a lot of her compilation album Machina Mori), she is steadily rising among voicebanks I love, if only because of her sheer concept, her design and some specific songs4.
Also, after discovering a self-cover of Become Your Heart by composer and producer Du Du Danyon and looping on that version too, I've ultimately been meaning to use one or the other for an AMV project or something. I eventually turned this idea into a tribute to Cosmic Princess Kaguya!, because that movie has had so much impact on the yuri fandom5 at large since its release in late January 2026, and for its imperfections its main romance is still steadily latched onto my brain.
Anyway. I don't know. Become Your Heart just answers that exact craving for monstrous lesbians in hopeful tragedy stories that I have.
Affection Addiction
by KAT and AkuP, feat POPY (SynthV)
There is something delightfully mid-2010s Internet culture to this song's heavy dubstep beat, aesthetic and lyrics about toxic attachment that hits the exact right spot. YouTube's algorithm had been trying to recommend it to me for months, and I didn't yield, until I did. I regret nothing. I was immediately blown away by its intensity - slightly edgy but also clearly written from the heart, with some clever censorship of sex mention taking me off-guard, and a growing weight throughout the song that makes the last iteration of the chorus hit like a gut punch.
And then I had it on loop for the entirety of February. Gosh, it was good.
It's also been meaningful seeing this song become rather iconic on the English vocal synth scene. I mean, it's something to have lesbian situationship songs made by trans women blow up like this, y'know?
More generally, I feel like a lot of the recent English scene is queer people writing queer songs, and honestly, I'm all here for it. It's such a good time to be an English vocal synth fan.
Aside from that, I know basically nothing about POPY as a voicebank6. A quick research informs me that she is based on a character from the BanG Dream! girls' band multimedia project; and that she has voicebanks for both SynthesizerV and CeVIO - two of the more recent vocal synth softwares, CeVIO being the one I'm the least familiar with.
Scratch (Leave You Starstruck)
by Vane Lily, feat Yi Xi (SynthV)
Before this, I only knew Vane Lily for their enemies-slash-lovers lesbian vocal synth song FIRE!!! made with JamieP feat Kasane Teto, and for being a member of the music circle Flavor Foley (more on that below). Similarly, I only knew Mandarin Chinese vocal synth character Yi Xi for, like, one influential English song by Flavor Foley about cannibalism7. But when I saw this song release back in late January I couldn't not click - the thumbnail with Yi Xi designed as a dangerously cool and somewhat realistic adult woman8 really drew me in.
I was then immediately hooked by the jazzy casino/silent movie atmosphere of the song, where a goddess of gambling and greed encourages you to spend everything you have until you stake your soul9. And there's something in Yi Xi's tuning here, somewhere between alluring and fierce and dangerous, that really works with me. She'd ruin me for sure.
While there's seemingly a lore behind several of Vane Lily's interconnected songs that includes this one, I couldn't really get into that; but I feel like this song deserves a listen no matter what. It did leave me starstruck alright - or more precisely very much into cool demonic women bossing me around. I may just be really gay.
Anyway, this has become Yi Xi's new reference song for me. Also apparently no one uses her voicebank for anything that isn't unhinged and dangerous, because since then I've mostly seen her featured in KAT's latest messy, gun-loaded lesbian breakup song. Never change, Yi Xi.
Ego Renegade Boy
by Flavor Foley, feat Kagamine Len (Vocaloid4 V4X) and Kagamine Rin (Vocaloid2 ACT1)
I'll definitely talk again about Flavor Foley when making a bigger post on iconic vocal synth songs I've obsessed over. So far, suffice to say that this English vocal synth music circle founded two years ago has released many songs that have been very impactful in the community. Additionally, the fact that all three of its members - ricedeity, Vane Lily and Jamie Paige - are queer is significant and obvious in a lot of their songs... and all the more here with their latest song as I'm writing this, Ego Renegade Boy.
Ego Renegade Boy is at first glance a song about an unsolved murder and the trial of the presumed killer (and be wary that it references various forms of death penalty, which can feel unsettling). But... what if there's more to it?
The song features the latest voicebank of Kagamine Len10, and at specific moments, the very first voicebank of Kagamine Rin.
Although only Hatsune Miku has gained recognition outside of the fandom, the two characters of Rin and Len are well-known within the Vocaloid community. Created at the end of 2007 as a pair of twin voicebanks, a boy and a girl, their relationship has been left up to interpretation and can vary widely between songs - but they're still thought of as twins the most.
Ego Renegade Boy borrows inspiration from many uses of Rin and Len that have been made before, such as them solving/committing murder, them using their physical resemblance to swap roles amidst tragedies, or one being just a persona for the other to live a queer relationship in secret. But it does something I haven't seen done before throughout my fifteen years of Vocaloid fandom lurking - something which may not feel as mindblowing to you, but which has really been eye-opening to me.
I'd let you guess what that is, but spelling it out here may get you into the song more, so: this is a song about being trans. And I've just-- I've never seen Rin and Len used for a trans metaphor, as pre/post-transition designs of the same person, despite them fitting the bill so perfectly. I feel like I should've realized this potential sooner, but I was also just amazed at that stroke of queer genius, my jaw dropping when this "murder" mystery slotted into place and all of the accusations of guilt leveraged against Len were suddenly reframed as transphobia from a family "grieving their daughter"11.
So, I'll just leave you with this12. I feel like this song has some absolutely striking lyrics on how Len retorts to the accusations against him, and it's really been providing some newfound fire to my early month of March. I wish you some of it.
As a conclusion to this post, I'd be remiss not to mention that your current best shot at finding new English vocal synth producers to get into may very well be through the birthday tribute to Jamie Paige, who is clearly the English scene's most prominent figure right now. A lot of the community collaborated to make a very heartfelt remix, both visually and in production, of her song Machine Love - which was itself a tribute to the community built around the voicebank of Kasane Teto, and to one of Teto's first songs, Song of the Eared Robot. You can check the credits to the Machine Love Remix here, and branch out from there.
I hope by now you're convinced that the vocal synth fandom is a rabbit hole with no bottom - and this is just a sliver of the English community. Next time, we'll focus on the larger fandom's nearly two decades of artistic creation, and I'll showcase - probably split into two posts - some songs that have stayed with me throughout my time with it.
Until then, thank you for reading, and for bearing with my undying love of footnotes.
"Chimera" is literally Teto's official gender. I'm always delighted when people make use of that one way or another.↩
May I introduce you to Tobiraka Doa, a voicebank for the UTAU software based on a creaking door. She's extremely niche but she's one of my favorite voicebanks if only just for that idea and her concept art. You can find all the songs she's been used for here.↩
More information on Adachi Rei's voicebank adapted to English can be found here and here.↩
I will at some point talk about Heat Abnormal by iyowa, which made me burst into tears too many times to count from sheer emotion when I first listened to it around a month ago. It effortlessly, immediately reached my top 5 favorite vocal synth songs, altering something in my brain chemistry with an intensity I never entirely recovered from. But that'll be for another post, I believe.↩
I could go on a long tangent about it, and I'll try not to. Let's just say that despite how much I still feel like the movie has pacing issues and a mostly uninteresting mid-story antagonist, I still love a lot of it and think about it extremely regularly. These thoughts have been steadily fueled by many things in the past few months, including great fanart all around and some unexpected official art, a treasure trove of wonderful fan mangas, offhanded reveals of the gayness of several side characters both in the movie's guidebook and the light novel adaptation, and how the movie's team has been paying homage to and covering so many Vocaloid songs - with the most notable instance of those covers also acting as an extremely important canon epilogue to the movie itself. Also, some of the movie's plot elements somehow remind me of stuff related to my one true pairing, which clearly contributed to why Cosmic Princess Kaguya! stuck with me this much.↩
The only songs I do know using POPY are the catchy POPY BEATS by Marigold Carnival; and this very cool English cover by ami of the 2020 banger Telecaster B Boy by surii feat Kagamine Len, about two trans people trying to get approved by an oppressive society.↩
I'll probably say it again, but despite loving that music circle to bits, I'm always a bit uncomfortable when mentioning Flavor Foley's most influential song, Butcher Vanity. Not because of its theme of cannibalism (not the most unhinged and/or disturbing vocal synth song by a long stretch), but because it was directly inspired by eating steak tartare, something that Flavor Foley's members describe extremely positively and that their gorey lyrics don't interrogate in the least. And I did eat tartare before in my life, but now that I'm almost vegan it just rings as particularly atrocious - a mostly uninterrogated glorification of animal slaughter, of which Butcher Vanity feels like a thematic extension. (and you've probably heard this before, but cutting out red meat from your diet is also one of the biggest decisions you could individually make from an ecological standpoint. i'm just... i'm tired of carnism in general.)↩
To be precise, this isn't technically Yi Xi: it's Vane Lily's spin on Yi Xi's design, making her into an original character called Micah. They apparently already featured the character of Micah once before in their song Devil's Casino back in 2021, but at the time she used the voice of Vocaloid GUMI and her appearance was heavily based on GUMI's design - making her appearance in Scratch (Leave You Starstruck) a big redesign, obviously influenced by Yi Xi's design in the first place. But to be even more precise, and I'm just finding this out as I'm researching for this post, Yi Xi doesn't actually have any official character design! Her most commonly used design, and definitely the one that had an influence here, stems from the Vimalion Project, which aims to establish baselines of character traits for voicebanks that don't have official profiles. I obviously love this idea: this was a core marketing decision of the company Crypton Future Media when it developped Vocaloid voicebanks back in the 2000s, and it is in good part why most fan-favorite Vocaloids have been so influential, Hatsune Miku most of all. I find it fantastic to see this trend perpetuated by fans here.↩
Silly note, but: I'm really not much into the series Hazbin Hotel - I have watched its two seasons so far and have a lot to criticize about them - but somehow, the AMV-wired part of my brain couldn't help but think that both this song and Affection Addiction could really fit some of its elements. Make of that what you want, I suppose.↩
which dates back to... 2015. Hopefully at some point the Kagamine twins will make a more modern comeback.↩
I could gush about those lyrics for a long while: Len's sheer pride and "smile that sparks a flame", his heavy question "did you know her? [...] if you knew you'd know I had to let her go", the whole talk about "embellish your relation, pain that you feign for a stranger 'cause you'd rather see me gone"... whew. The parental discourse about grieving their child when said child is right there, and of setting up a literal rigged trial against them and their decision to transition, is also a very real thing for a lot of trans people, and something I've been experiencing firsthand. I wish it to no one. This song heals some of that experience, and I can't thank Flavor Foley enough for that.↩
And if you're interested, there's also a lot of transmasc/enby covers of the song, like here, here, here, here, here, or here. This makes me so happy to see.↩