The Best Song of the Year — but There's Something Wrong with this Band
The musical hype of the rock summer of 2025 is known as The Velvet Sundown! The guys sound like a rock band from the seventies but only released their first album in June 2025, as well as their second. There's a lot about this band that's mysterious, some of it even suspicious. Sherlock Drees rolled up his sleeves to get the lowdown on the matter.
I'm really in a festive mood: it's summer, it's a sweltering 36 degrees, and I'm always driven by my love of music. So "The Velvet Sundown" came about at just the right time. This band is currently blowing through my social media feeds like a fresh summer breeze. I'm currently listening to their latest single, "Dust on the Wind," on Spotify, and the song reminds me that I'd love to be standing in a music festival with friends and a cold brew in my hand right now.
The Velvet Sundown - that's their secret
I immediately added one of their songs to one of my playlists, and sure enough: they also appear in official Spotify playlists. Hence, it's no mystery that a band that burst onto the world stage out of nowhere this month already has over 600,000 regular listeners on the world's biggest music streaming service.
A look at the band's biography on Spotify reveals the names of the four band members, but the band does retain an aura of mystery overall. What were the four guys up to before? Where did the band hail from? These are questions that were not answered. The end of the lyrics sounded somewhat suspicious:
The Velvet Sundown are not trying to revive the past. They are rewriting it. They sound like the memory of a time that never existed ... and still manage to make it seem tangibly real.
A time that never existed? Rewriting the past? By now, at the very least, you probably have an idea of where the journey is headed. Yes, this band doesn't really exist. A look at their Instagram channel, for example, obviously reveals AI-generated images.
In fact, I probably would have noticed at some point that something wasn't quite right about the entire setup. The vocals don't always seem one hundred percent consistent, and the sound is sometimes suspiciously cobbled together like Frankenstein's monster. But there were articles from the likes of Consequence that put me back on track. However, yes: to just about everyone, The Velvet Sundown is a band that owes its existence entirely to artificial intelligence. Even the great Rick Beato already shared his thoughts about the band:
Why, Spotify?
This new look at the "band" raises questions for me. First of all, how long is it before we have any chance of recognizing whether music is AI-generated? And for how long will we think this is a bad thing? Initial studies suggest that AI music will consume a quarter of the music market by 2028. We've already talked about the AI music phenomenon several times in the Casa-Casi podcast.
I also wrote some time back about how I fear that we are all guilty of helping open the door to AI music. However, I now wonder why streaming giants like Spotify or Apple Music are unable to label AI-generated music. I think only Deezer does that at the moment.
What does this actually look like from a legal perspective? Not only do we know nothing about the "artists" behind the band. There is also no indication of the technical implementation. It's possible that Udio, Suno, Riffusion, or similar tools were used here. Whether the creators of the songs have the rights to the songs and are officially allowed to make money from them remains unclear at the moment.
Please let me know what you think in the comments: Should there be AI labels for such music? Should AI music even have a right to exist on platforms like Spotify? Or have you perhaps long since made your peace with the fact that such music exists and, at least in part, outstrips "real" music?
A big bluff?
Some part of me, which is somewhat on the conspiracy theorist spectrum, planted a completely different thought in my brain, which I don't want to withhold from you as part of the conclusion: What if all of these are intentional? So what if the partly generic lyrics and the sound offer clues that point to AI, the very obvious AI images, and more? What if we are being led around by the nose?
I have to think of Nirvana, who delivered a very raw debut album, but then something completely different with Nevermind. At first glance, it's still loud, raw, and real; at second glance, it's highly professionally produced and polished music that plays like a garage band.
In 1991, Nirvana sounded like the dirty outcry of a new generation — yet Nevermind was produced as smoothly as a Bryan Adams album. Today, The Velvet Sundown could work the other way around: Music that sounds far too emotional, too warm, and too stylistically confident to really come from a machine — which is precisely why it was packaged the way it was. Perhaps we're not dealing with the first AI rock band, but with the first band that pretends to be one. The perfect bluff for the streaming age. Why? Because the chance of a viral hit and a career may simply be greater this way.
