The Velvet Sundown
In June, a new band calling themselves The Velvet Sundown emerged, racking up a million monthly Spotify listeners in the process. The two albums they had available to stream, Floating On Echoes (released on June 5) and Dust And Silence (released on June 20), showed that they make rustic and heartfelt folk-country music in the vein of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The “about” section of their Spotify page named them as “vocalist and mellotron sorcerer Gabe Farrow, guitarist Lennie West, bassist-synth alchemist Milo Rains, and free-spirited percussionist Orion ‘Rio’ Del Mar.” Meanwhile, a bio on their verified X account described them as “Not quite human. Not quite machine.”
The arrival of a new band under normal circumstances would be a non-story, but that little not-quite-human caveat soon propelled The Velvet Sundown, and its mysterious origins, into one of music’s biggest headlines in the ensuing weeks. On July 5, the band posted a statement that revealed definitively that the music they’d released were indeed AI-generated, but not before the story had taken a strange series of turns involving scammers, trolling, and an elaborate prank. Ahead, find our breakdown of everything to know about The Velvet Sundown, and how a seemingly straightforward story about AI in music turned into one of the strangest sagas of the year.
So who are The Velvet Sundown?
The allusion to things not quite being real took on new meaning when a Velvet Sundown Instagram account appeared at the start of July 2025. It featured multiple images of four dudes looking a lot like a band — there are guitars and beards aplenty — but with one key difference: they were clearly AI generated.
It wasn’t just these slop-like images that flagged The Velvet Sundown as a possible AI band. As Stereogum pointed out, their Deezer profile noted that “some tracks on this album (Dust and Silence) may have been created using artificial intelligence.” The Velvet Sundown’s music was also suspiciously populating Spotify-generated playlists like Vietnam War Music and Good Mornings – Happily Positive Music To Start The Day.
It’s worth noting that much of the attention The Velvet Sundown garnered early on was built off the idea that hundreds of thousands of people were listening to their music. This could’ve been true, but it’s also known that Spotify has long had an issue with fake streams. The company fines offenders and states it puts “significant engineering resources and research into detecting, mitigating, and removing artificial streaming activity.” (Spotify CEO Daniel Ek is, meanwhile, is facing criticism over his investments in A.I. software used in military operations, adds weight to the belief that it is harder than ever to stream music on the platform with a clear conscience.)
The Velvet Sundown responded — then it got weird.
On Wednesday, July 2, a band spokesperson describing himself as an “adjunct” member named Andrew Frelon spoke to Rolling Stone. He claimed that The Velvet Sundown used the generative-AI platform Suno in the creation of their songs, and that he considers the whole project to be an “art hoax.”
“It’s marketing. It’s trolling,” he told the publication. “People before, they didn’t care about what we did, and now suddenly, we’re talking to Rolling Stone, so it’s like, ‘Is that wrong?’”
Soon after the Rolling Stone post was published, however, the band issued a statement via Instagram and X distancing themselves from Frelon.
“Someone is attempting to hijack the identity of The Velvet Sundown by releasing unauthorized interviews, publishing unrelated photos, and creating fake profiles claiming to represent us — none of which are legitimate, accurate, or connected in any way to us,” their statement read.
It continued: “Some interviews have surfaced featuring someone identified as ‘Andrew Frelon’ allegedly speaking for The Velvet Sundown. We have no affiliation with this individual, nor any evidence confirming their identity or existence.”
So who was “Andrew Frelon”?
Frelon, it turned out, had been running a fake X account created in the band’s name.
In a Medium post published on July 3, Frelon came clean. He admitted to having effectively pranked two publications (Rolling Stone and the Washington Post) by pretending to be the person behind The Velvet Sundown after they mistakenly reached out to his X account and requested interviews.
Frelon wrote that he has a background in both generative AI and online safety. He added that he performed this stunt to expose the “numerous and large gaps in the verification process used by the majority of journalists” while also exploiting “a confusing situation around account ownership based on my professional knowledge in this domain.”
He also revealed that his name isn’t actually Andrew Frelon — “Frelon means hornet in French, an annoying insect which seemed a fitting mascot for my effort,” he wrote — and that he was also not responsible for the Instagram account filled with AI imagery that kickstarted this whole conversation. That is seemingly not affiliated with either The Velvet Sundown or Frelon, though the band do use the same images as avatars on their verified accounts.
The real truth about The Velvet Sundown?
The whole confusing affair was (slightly) cleared up on July 5 when the Velvet Sundown confirmed what many had suspected all along — that their music is A.I. generated. “The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence,” a statement posted on their official accounts read.
Dressing things up as an artistic statement, the message describes the group as being. “Not quite human. Not quite machine” but living “somewhere in between.”
Perhaps the last word on all of this should go to human songwriter and dry wit Father John Misty (yes, this is his real account, we checked).
