When Damon Albarn dropped the first Gorillaz album in 2001 it felt like a fresh, brilliant and exciting idea – a cartoon band employing avatars based on the Manga-inspired comic book art of collaborator Jamie Hewlett, he of Tank Girl fame. A virtual pop group for the dawn of the virtual age. But while members 2-D, Murdoc, Noodle and Russel were fictions grooving in saturated colour through animated videos, we knew at least that the music they made was real – because it was Albarn and his flesh and blood musical partners who made it and who on occasions toured with it.

Fast forward a quarter of a century and there is little that is brilliant or exciting about the extent to which generative AI is now throwing one fake act after another into the pop sphere, and in particular the world of streaming. “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” is a famous meme from the 1990s. We did once know if they were a gorilla, but today the nature of the beast is anybody’s guess. That band on the Spotify playlist, the one you’ve never heard of but which has millions of streams? There could be a reason. They might not be real, the music made by machines.

Enter The Velvet Sundown, a mysterious, new, all-male four-piece peddling blameless acoustic balladry and racking up large numbers of plays. Dust In The Wind, a track from debut album Floating On Echoes, released last month, has over a million on Spotify and at the time of writing the group enjoyed 1.1 million monthly listeners. But are they real? Many think not. The band members are named but there are no associated social media accounts. They’ve never given an interview. They’ve never played live. As far as anyone can tell.

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