The Velvet Sundown’s shaggy retro-rock has attracted 750,000 listeners — but is it all an AI hoax?

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The Velvet Sundown have come out of nowhere with their clumsily familiar name to rack up over 750,000 Spotify listeners. Unknown just a few weeks ago, they released two albums of throwback 1970s-style rock in June, and are poised to send another into the world this month. Despite the sensimilla smoke-wreathed ambience of their music, the four mystery men from an unknown location are apparently in the grip of an amphetamine recording jag.

Floating on Echoes is their debut. It has lots of shaggy riffs, scrunched-eyes solos and heartily cried vocals. “Back Home Never Came” takes us to the Vietnam war. “Helicopters in the haze/Boys went off in a smoky blaze,” singer and mellotron player Gabe Farrow exclaims, sounding not unlike Robert Plant making maladroit use of a rhyming dictionary. Dust and Silence is the follow-up. It finds the boys laying down a barefoot, organic sound, as though recumbent in a dream of a distant Californian day. This time, Farrow sounds like he’s auditioning for The Eagles.

He and his bandmates — guitarist Lennie West, synth-player Milo Rains and percussionist Orion “Rio” Del Mar, who the bands Spotify bio characterises as “free-spirited” — have provoked speculation that they are not who they claim to be. The stock nature of their song titles (“Dust on the Wind”, “The Wind Still Knows Our Name”, and so on) will be familiar to users of AI music generating platforms. The quartet have proved impossible to track down in real life.

The “band” have clapped back on X at “the lazy, baseless theory” of AI fakery. A picture was tweeted showing them celebrating with a meal, holding hamburgers as if unsure what to do with them (the image appears to have been AI-generated). A revelation in Rolling Stone that it’s a hoax has been denied on their Spotify page.

All this is surely a five-star wind-up, pranking a genre fetishised as “real music” and tweaking the noses of AI-phobes. The songs aren’t so bad either. The lyrics are drivel, but the rest is a proficient exercise in retro-rock. You can listen without feeling that your soul has been drained like the knackered battery of an obsolete smartphone.

★★★☆☆

‘Floating on Echoes’ and ‘Dust and Silence’ are self-released