Photography And Half-Thoughts By Mitchell Hegman

...because some of it is pretty and some of it is not.

Thursday, July 3, 2025

The Rock Band That Isn’t

A strange thing is happening over on Spotify. A band called The Velvet Sundown has suddenly emerged from the digital mist, fully formed, with two full albums and—at last check—more than half a million monthly listeners. Problem is, no one seems to know if they’re real.

The supposed members—Gabe Farrow, Lennie West, Milo Rains, and Orion “Rio” Del Mar—don’t exist anywhere else online. Not in other bands, not in old interviews, not in the musical sidebars of the internet where even the most obscure garage acts tend to leave a trace. Their Spotify profile includes a made-up quote from Billboard. Their Instagram is littered with glossy portraits that fall apart under close inspection—too-perfect faces, visual tells that AI image generators often leave behind.

Music platforms like Deezer have already flagged their tracks as possibly AI-generated. Spotify and Apple Music have not.

This all raises the larger question everyone’s dancing around: What does it mean when AI-generated music gets pushed into our ears right alongside the work of struggling indie bands, live musicians, and lifelong artists?

Are we hearing the entirely digitized future of music?

The song “Dust on the Wind” has garnered a lot of traction. I will admit to finding it a catchy song, though slightly formulaic in structure. The lyrics, though, leave me feeling cold. Having seemingly been fed through a rhyme generator, the words strike me as thematically abstract and empty.

So, here we are, floating somewhere between false echo and invention.

I’ve posted a photograph of the band and a video featuring the song “Dust on the Wind” so you can listen for yourself.

The Velvet Sundown

—Mitchell Hegman

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzX1YFZW0jc

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