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 transitions, lifeless arrangements. It’s not just bad music. It’s music that seems to crystallize a common fear: that AI will slowly drain creativity of its surprise and vitality, replacing it with sterile pastiche.

 

Now, enter Osmium. I first heard about them because Rully Shabara of Senyawa is involved, and if you’ve ever heard him vocalize, you’ll know he doesn’t sound like anything else on this planet. From birdsong to guttural howls, Rully’s voice is a force of nature. But Osmium isn’t just about his vocal acrobatics. It’s a group that resists genre altogether. Osmium make music that defies easy classification – an alchemical mix of experimental doom, ritual noise, and avant-garde improvisation. Their sound is dark, disorienting, and deeply textured. AI tools appear not as shortcuts but as strange collaborators, helping to twist sonic materials into something alien and handmade. The result is music that feels ancient and futuristic at once – unsettling, immersive, and entirely unlike anything else. It doesn’t sound like it came from a prompt.

And here’s the twist: Osmium uses AI tools too.

 

But rather than relying on AI to automate the act of music-making, they use it to warp and stretch the process into new and unfamiliar territory. They craft bespoke instruments, often of their own making, and use AI as one element in a broader experimental practice. The result is something unique, handcrafted, and deeply human – despite the involvement of non-human tools.

 

So, what’s my point? Is this just a long-winded way of saying “AI can be used for good or evil depending on who wields it”? Kind of. But not exactly.

 

Yes, Osmium shows us that AI tools can be bent toward strange and beautiful ends. This isn’t new. Think of how musicians have always pushed their tools to unexpected places. A drum machine can be used to pump out a generic four-on-the-floor beat – or it can be distorted, broken, and reconfigured into something monstrous and thrilling. The same logic applies to AI. You can feed it clichés and get clichés back. Or you can twist it until it becomes something else entirely.

 

But we shouldn’t reduce this to a matter of personal taste or individual creativity. It’s tempting to frame this as a purely voluntaristic issue – if only more artists were like Osmium and less like The Velvet Sundown, all would be well. Yet that obscures the broader political, economic, and ecological dimensions of AI itself. Training large models consumes enormous energy. It relies on the exploitation of invisible labor, from the underpaid workers labeling data to the theft of vast swaths of human cultural production without consent. These are not neutral tools, waiting to be used wisely or poorly – they are embedded in very specific infrastructures of power.

 

What we need, then, is a more nuanced conversation about AI – not the knee-jerk “AI is ruining art” panic, nor the breathless “AI is the future” hype. We need to think about AI tools in terms of their path dependencies – the specific, constrained trajectories that shape how they’re built, used, and imagined. These paths aren’t fixed, but they’re also not entirely open. Understanding those trajectories, and pushing back against the ones that flatten or commodify culture, is essential. In other words, maybe Osmium vs. The Velvet Sundown isn’t just a fun thought experiment. Maybe it’s a small parable for how we might start thinking about AI – not as a threat or a savior, but as a contested terrain where creativity, power, and politics all meet and fight out it. That, my friend, is the messy ass historical juncture we live in.