Do you remember when Gorillaz debuted? Do you remember how fresh and interesting it was to see a ‘virtual band’ composed of kooky animated characters each with their own unique and wholly invented personality? Do you remember the painstaking lengths Damon Albarn took to craft the world of the band, ensuring that even though a band of cartoon characters could never be made manifest in real life all of their music videos, songs and promotional material formed a cohesive and fully realized world? Well I’m happy to report that in the year of our lord, 2025, people will never have to slave away like this again. We have reached a new frontier of fake bands raking in listeners and the masterminds behind this one didn’t have to think half as hard about it. 

I am of course talking about the AI “Band” The Velvet Sundown, a psych-rock outfit with over 750,000 Spotify listeners which is proudly made entirely in the AI program Suno. And by proudly I mean that the creator (in his own words “spokesperson”) of the band Andrew Frelon constructed half-truth after half-truth about the nature of the band’s genesis before coming up with the ingenious line that the whole band is an “art hoax”. 

When pressed on the issue by Rolling Stone Frelon had this to say “The Leeds 13, a group of art students in the UK, made, like, fake photos of themselves spending scholarship money at a beach or something like that, and it became a huge scandal. I think that stuff’s really interesting… We live in a world now where things that are fake have sometimes even more impact than things that are real. And that’s messed up, but that’s the reality that we face now. So it’s like, ‘Should we ignore that reality? Should we ignore these things that kind of exist on a continuum of real versus fake or kind of a blend between the two? Or should we dive into it and just let it be the emerging native language of the internet?” Frelon graces us with some excellent word salad justification of the variety usually only dispensed by half-assed art school students.

It’s tempting to give Frelon the benefit of the doubt that maybe this critique is too gigabrained and we’re all just morons for not seeing it immediately. Maybe Andrew Frelon is a uniquely gifted satirist who sees the coming tide and feels he can only appropriately comment on it through his one true gift, AI slop. Immensely profitable AI slop. 

It is when looking at the profit motives behind this musical endeavor (if we’re generous enough to call it that) that this whole facade falls apart. Frelon claims he has no idea how the band amassed so many followers. In his words, the band members, the completely fake band members, got the music on some playlists and “it seems to have spiraled from there” 

Perhaps I will be eating my word one day but this seems like a cynical grift pretending to make a ‘statement’ by being a cynical grift. As Abby Jones of Stereogum dryly points out, the band is on the precipice of releasing their third album in two months. Albums that require as much work to create as typing the phrase “cool indie rock tame impala type coffee shop vibe please and thank you”. If this is all it takes to be successful now, imagine how pissed 2-D and Noodle must be.