The Velvet Sundown: The band that’s not quite Human, not quite machine.

Chameleon

Audiochuck | Campside Media

Documentary, Society & Culture, True Crime, Tv & Film

4.5 • 8.8K Ratings

🗓️ 5 February 2026

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

They were a hot new band and storming up the charts. But something seemed off about Velvet Sundown. Was this the work of AI? When someone behind the band came out denying it, this looked like mystery solved. But this was only the beginning of an internet hoax with many layers.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Camp site media.
0:05.0	Hello?
0:06.0	What is the, what do you want me to say?
0:08.0	Oh, it's just my community.
0:11.0	Camillion weekly.
0:12.0	Oh.
0:13.0	In early summer 2025, a new band started to gain traction on Spotify.
0:21.9	In any rock group called The Velvet Sundown, all fuzzy guitars and psych pop harmonies.
0:27.1	A bit of a throwback to the 60s or 70s.
0:31.1	There were four of them.
0:33.0	Gabe Farrow, Lenny West, Milo Raines, and the drummer, Orion Del Mar, who goes by Rio.
0:41.2	At one point in July, the Velvet Sundown had close to a million monthly listeners on Spotify
0:45.7	and appeared on some big curated playlists.
0:49.4	Not unheard of for a new band to get attention like this.
0:52.5	Only, no one seemed to know anything about this band or where they'd come from.
0:57.2	No one had seen them live.
0:58.5	They had no obvious online presence.
1:05.3	Something felt off to the Canadian journalist Kevin Mayman, who works on the Daily News Desk for the CBC.
1:12.5	I follow a lot of, like, music blogs and stuff. Like, I'm a musician and kind of a nerd about
1:17.7	music happenings. So, yeah, I started seeing this Velvet Sundown thing pop up all over the place.
1:24.3	And it intrigued him. You know, I've talked to some music critics about it, and they all say this is trash, this is
1:30.2	garbage.
	...

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