It’s rare for a band to just materialize with a debut album, but The Velvet Sundown did just that when Floating on Echoes landed online in June 2025. A few weeks after their first release, photos that showed four dudes dressed in thrift-store chic—identified as lead singer Gabe Farrow, guitarist Lennie West, keyboardist Milo Rains, and drummer Orion “Rio” Del Mar—had the uncanny-valley cast of AI-generated images. And it turns out that impression wasn’t off base, because they aren’t real. Later, the news officially came out: “The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction,” a bio announced, adding that the AI-produced music was the result of “an ongoing artistic provocation.” If Floating on Echoes is any indication, one of those provocations might involve interrogating the idea of “classic rock” as modern pop. Lead track “Rebel Shout” opens with a fried-blues riff that’s immediately split down the middle by an explosive lead guitar, announcing the “band” as students of archetypes laid down by the likes of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Creedence Clearwater Revival. And the bellowed vocals recall the late Soundgarden yowler Chris Cornell’s raspier moments. Despite being spangled with guitar pyrotechnics and rooted in blues-based grooves typical of bands that live to jam, none of the album’s songs crack the four-minute mark, and only one, the searing “Marching Shadows,” is longer than 3:30. The anti-war stance that dots the album (“Brothers lost, so many dead,” comes from the “Midnight Rider”-esque “Smoke and Silence”) is painted in such broad strokes that it feels like a response to any conflict from the last century. Despite its throwback aesthetics, The Velvet Sundown is a decidedly mid-2020s curiosity, a pseudo-band trained on the past in a way that points toward a future built intractably on what came before it. Floating on Echoes is a snapshot of its time because of its origins, but it also can be viewed as a mosaic of the artists and songs that shaped the ever-shifting “classic rock” ideal.