The Velvet Sundown: A ghost band with no proof of life

Have you heard of The Velvet Sundown? It’s kind of like The Velvet Underground, except The Velvet Underground is definitely real, and the jury is still out for The Velvet Sundown.

The band’s photos look remarkably AI-generated — too clean, not quite textured enough, oddly inhuman, yet it has racked up more than 372,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. Their bio reads that they are “quietly spellbinding” and uses those odd, unspecific metaphors so common in AI-generated text, like comparing the band’s music to “a scent that suddenly takes you back somewhere you didn’t expect.”

Their bio purports that it was formed by singer and mellotron player Gabe Farrow, guitarist Lennie West, synth player Milo Raines, and percussionist Orion “Rio” Del Mar. None of them has ever been interviewed. And, not that a social media account is necessarily proof of life, but none of them have an Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook account — and neither does the band itself. In fact, none of the band members seems to have a single shred of an internet presence.

The song credits on Spotify are also a bit suspicious. Most artists will have multiple people in the credits, but the credits on Spotify for every single one of their songs are “Performed by,” “Written by,” and “Source” by The Velvet Sundown. There is no producer listed.

“The Velvet Sundown aren’t trying to revive the past,” their Spotify bio reads. “They’re rewriting it. They sound like the memory of a time that never actually happened… but somehow they make it feel real.”

Are they playing with us? Listening to the band myself, it does sound AI-generated — the lyrics lack specificity, and the music itself lacks depth. But it’s also kind of… fine music? Suno and Udio, two of the most-used AI-powered music generators, have been “churning out soulless slop” for about two years, as Music Radar reported, and if The Velvet Sundown is using those tools to create music, it might be one of the first more successful uses of the platforms’ ability to “capture the public’s imagination in the way that many of the technology’s critics had feared.”

On YouTube, there’s an entire ecosystem of AI-generated music. One standout is AI For The Culture, a channel that reimagines rap and R&B tracks as vintage Motown or blues cuts — complete with fictional artists and AI-generated bios to match. One particularly notable example: an AI-rendered cover of Future’s “Turn On the Lights,” which was later sampled by rapper JPEGMAFIA on his latest album.

While the band hasn’t confirmed that it’s AI-generated, it has also done little to prove people wrong. Music Radar says it “bears the unmistakably lo-fi veneer of a Suno creation.” One Reddit post says there isn’t a “shred of evidence on the internet that this band has ever existed.”

But, in the end, there’s no actual proof that the band is generated by AI, and therein lies the struggle. When AI music becomes this difficult to catch, whose job is it to catch it? The trouble has led some users to post their disappointment in Spotify for not informing listeners that the band is or is not AI-generated. “We should be boycotting Spotify by now,” one person said on Reddit, and another person responded by pointing out that the band is also on Apple Music and Amazon Music.

Spotify did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mashable.