Cole Cuchna

This softer side of the album is crucial to our understanding of its core theme, which is explicitly suggested in the album's title, Human After All.

It's a play on the phrase I'm only human after all, which is typically said after making a mistake, implying that imperfection is an essential part of being human.

But after all also implies a conclusion, something realized in hindsight, once everything has been considered.

It's often used when revising our initial judgment, when we say something like, it wasn't so bad after all.

In an album centered on the tension between humanity and technology, the implication seems to be that after so much technological progress and integration, realizing the value of our humanity, our imperfections, our emotions, our mortality, is a necessary conclusion if humanity is to survive at all.

Because if we continue down a path steered only by technologic, these traits will continue to be sacrificed in the name of efficiency and optimization.

Curiously, Human After All is placed first in the tracklist, an ironic way to open the album.

It's a similar trick to Discovery beginning with One More Time, an encore performed at the start.

Likewise, Human After All, with its implications of finality, feels slightly tongue-in-cheek.

But in my reading, this placement reveals something larger about the album's structure.

Like the film Pulp Fiction, it's my opinion that Human After All begins at the start of its ending, and that ending continues into the album's second track, The Prime Time of Your Life, where our half-human, half-robot voices urge us, almost command us, to recognize the value of being alive, to realize that the prime of our life is always right now.

In this interpretation, the prime time of your life serves as the album's narrative endpoint, its thematic conclusion and final statement to make full use of the human experience you've been gifted.

The track even ends like a true finale, with a chaotic crescendo as the percussion accelerates faster and faster until it totally collapses in on itself.

I mean, that sounds like a finale to me.

And in this reading of the album, the next track, Robot Rock, marks the true beginning of the narrative, a clear establishment of the robot's mechanical world.

From there, the album unfolds through a cold, technologically driven landscape until it reaches its final track, Emotion, where something human is rediscovered.

This leads us back to Human After All and Prime Time of Your Life, which in this reading is a thematically connected three-song sequence that closes the story, reaffirming our humanity.

In this sense, the album functions like an Ouroboros, a self-contained loop where the end feeds back into the beginning.

Humanity creates technology, technology begins to consume humanity, and only through that process do we arrive at the realization of what it means to be human after all.

Now because Human After All is such a sparse album, I understand if your instinct is to push back against this interpretation.