It’s official: the best new band of 2025 doesn’t exist.
Just two weeks ago, The Velvet Sundown was nowhere to be found. No gigs, no interviews, no grainy tour footage from 2011. Now? Two full albums, over 750,000 monthly Spotify listeners, and enough retro-soaked vibes to make Fleetwood Mac blush. But there’s a catch.
They’re not real.
Well, something exists. The music is there. The Instagram page is there. There are moody band portraits, album covers riffing on Abbey Road and Queen II, and a bio so poetic it could make a vinyl snob cry. But all signs point to The Velvet Sundown being an AI-generated musical hoax — a shimmering psych-rock mirage made entirely of ones, zeroes, and marketing mischief.
“There’s something quietly spellbinding about The Velvet Sundown,” their Spotify bio claims. “You don’t just listen to them, you drift into them.”
(Very chill. Very generated.)
The supposed band members — Gabe Farrow (vocals/mellotron), Lennie West (guitar), Milo Rains (keys), and Orion “Rio” Del Mar (drums) — exist only in bios and AI-processed imagery. Their photos have that hyperreal sheen and rubbery perfection you only get from generative tools. The music itself sounds suspiciously like it came from Suno, the $8/month app that lets you pump out 500 songs like it’s a creative slot machine. Thin percussion, shifting vocal timbres, dreamy-but-generic melodies — it’s all there.
Still, people listened. A lot of people. Maybe too many.
This sudden rise has sparked debates about so-called “ghost artists” — acts with no real-world presence who appear on major playlists, possibly to save platforms like Spotify money on royalties. Others suggest the play count might be boosted by bots. But according to Andrew Frelon — not his real name — who now admits he created The Velvet Sundown, the numbers are real. Or real enough for 2025.
“It’s marketing. It’s trolling. Is that wrong?” Frelon asked Rolling Stone, fresh off the high of duping half the internet. “People didn’t care before. Now they do. We’re in Rolling Stone. That’s a win.”
His point isn’t without merit. In a world where influencer toddlers earn endorsement deals and AI beauty queens sell skincare routines, what even is real anymore?
“We live in a world now where things that are fake have sometimes even more impact than things that are real,” Frelon says. “And that’s messed up, but that’s the reality.”
Frelon initially downplayed the AI component, saying it was mostly for “idea generation.” Later, he admitted some songs were created using Suno. Maybe more than some. It’s blurry — kind of like the band’s press photos.
Meanwhile, over on Deezer, nearly 20% of all uploaded music is now believed to be AI-generated — a number that’s doubled in just three months. The future of music might not be played by humans at all.
And yet… The Velvet Sundown kind of slaps?
That’s the awkward truth behind the satire. The music might be derivative and algorithmic, but it’s also catchy, well-produced, and good enough to pass for yet another Bandcamp discovery or festival warm-up act. If you didn’t know it was AI-generated, would you even notice?
Maybe that’s the whole point. In 2025, it turns out our new favorite band doesn’t have to be real — they just have to feel real enough. A pretty melody, a vintage font, a psychedelic shimmer. The rest is just marketing.
