This Indie Band Is Getting Popular on Spotify—But They Might Be AI

A psych-rock group called The Velvet Sundown has quietly racked up hundreds of thousands of listens on Spotify since early June. Not bad for a brand-new band that came seemingly out of nowhere—unless they didn’t actually exist in the first place.

Let’s rewind a bit. The Velvet Sundown burst onto the scene with a debut album, Floating on Echoes, followed by two more albums in rapid succession, all within five weeks. That’s output that could rival fellow psych-rock band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.

That band is made of flesh and blood human beings who have a preposterous work ethic that has allowed them to release 27 full-length studio albums and 56 live albums since their formation in 2010. Even the band’s name doesn’t seem to be deeply original, being a light twist on The Velvet Underground

This Band Might Be AI-Generated Even Though They Insist They Are Real Humans

We would be collectively questioning if King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard was AI generated music if it weren’t for the fact that we can look up videos of their live performances. We can even buy tickets to those live performances if we want to, and we’ve seen plenty of pictures of the band members together, all seemingly made out of skin and bones and not ones and zeros.

The same cannot be said of The Velvet Sundown. Their Instagram is littered with AI-generated images, including an Abbey Road homage, and no real tour dates or behind-the-scenes glimpses.

Their album art screams Midjourney, with the classic AI trait of mashed-up mangled fingers cropping up a couple of times. Their Spotify bio is fascinating, seeming like it was partially written by ChatGPT, partially written by a master criminal leaving a disheveled homicide detective a series of clues, describing the band as not “trying to revive the past. They’re rewriting it. They sound like the memory of a time that never actually happened… but somehow they make it feel real.”

Hm.

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Gabe Farrow, Lennie West, Milo Rains, and “Rio” Del Mar, the so-called “band members,” appear to have no online presence. These are men who look like they were born in the late 90s, and we’re supposed to believe this is the first time any of them have ever left a trace of their existence on the internet?

It’s almost as if they were conjured out of thin air via a carefully worded prompt rather than being born from endless garage rehearsals that annoy the neighbors.

To head off suspicion, an X/Twitter account claiming to be the real Velvet Sundown started fighting back against claims of being AI-generated by… not providing evidence other than insisting they are real over and over again in several dozen posts that go up with the frequency reminiscent of Elon Musk at peak substance abuse.

The account was created in March but didn’t start posting until June 29, with a tweet calling out media outlets for “falsely reporting that we are an AI-generated band” because “nothing could be further from the truth!”  

Is This the Real Life? Is This Just Fantasy?

A quick peek at the replies to several of their tweets reveals dozens of people who simply do not believe that at all, citing an abundance of evidence hinting at the most logical and extremely obvious conclusion: from all the information folks across the internet have collectively gathered, everything about this band is AI generated, except maybe it’s X/Twitter account, which it uses to do a poor job of convincing people that there are real band.

Thus far, as MusicRadar pointed out, only one music streaming, Deezer, provided a warning alongside their music letting users know that it “may have been created using artificial intelligence,” warnings conspicuously absent from major services like Spotify and Apple Music.

They are tagged as a “Verified Artist” on Spotify, which only seems to verify that it’s an artist’s official page, but doesn’t specify if the artist itself is officially a human. Also, Spotify has a massive slop music problem, so there is a question as to whether Spotify would even care in the first place.

If you’re tempted to give them a listen, maybe don’t. Or do. Whatever. It’s up to you. But just know that if you do give “their” music a listen, you may not be supporting the outfit you think you are, at least until the band provides convincing proof that they are who they say they are.