The Velvet Sundown is a virtual band / AI generated project, proclaiming to be an American four-piece band formed by vocalist and keyboardist Gabe Farrow, guitarist Lennie West, bassist Milo Rains, and percussionist Orion “Rio” Del Mar. These identities were created by AI, along with their photos. In June 2025, having amassed over 325k monthly listeners on Spotify, the artist began to surface on recommendation feeds and playlists. Doubts were quickly raised, prompting online investigations from Reddit, TikTok, and the music industry publication MusicAlly. While no definitive answers have (to date) been found as to the origin of this artist, these investigations suggest that the Velvet Sundown's surge in popularity can be attributed to "A network of playlists with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers, from mysterious curator accounts, stuffed with tracks from a band who don’t appear to exist" -- that is, a handful of Spotify accounts that have inserted the group's tracks within larger playlists, alongside popular artists like Oasis, the Rolling Stones, and Jimi Hendrix. In closing, MusicAlly mused "it would be fun if Gabe, Lennie, Milo and Orion suddenly broke cover and turned out to be flesh-and-blood human musicians", but that the lack of festival and tour dates suggest otherwise. Following several weeks of speculation, the group's profile was updated in early July to confirm that it was a "synthetic music project guided by human creative direction" and claimed the music is an "ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the future of music itself in the age of AI". Critics immediately dismissed this as a blatant attempt to retroactively portray the band as a legitimate artistic endeavor, having already been exposed as AI generated content that had exploited Spotify's playlist system to go viral. It now has over 1 million monthly listeners on Spotify.