Osmium vs. The Velvet Sundown

Recently, I stumbled across two new musical acts that got me thinking about AI – not in the abstract, hype-ridden way we often do, but in a more grounded and specific sense. Let’s imagine this as a boxing match. In one corner, weighing in as perhaps the shoddiest manifestation of AI-generated music sludge you can currently find, we have The Velvet Sundown . And in the other corner, lean, strange, and formidable, we have Osmium . Let’s start with The Velvet Sundown , a band that seems to have drawn a fair bit of digital ink lately. They make music that sounds vaguely like 1970s psych-rock – but only in the most superficial, uninspired way. It’s as if an AI was fed the prompt: “Give me something that sounds like Tame Impala covering a few dusty Kansas B-sides after a long nap,” and the result was churned out with no love or curiosity. The music is formulaic, derivative, and worse, you can hear the telltale digital scars – glitchy artifacts, awkward t...