It’s another milestone in the onward march of the bots – the number one country song in the US this week is an AI-generated creation.
The track is Walk My Walk by Breaking Rust and as you can hear below, though it’s admittedly a step up from Velvet Sundown, and a totally plausible effort, there’s something just a little too mannered, too perfect in its approximation of a scuffed-up, down-on-his-luck country vocalist. Or is that wishful thinking?
It’s not clear who or what is behind Breaking Rust. Its artist biography on Linktree merely says: ‘Music for the fighters and the dreamers’ and whilst it has an Instagram profile, it’s merely filled of pictures of a moody-looking cowboy fellow in various settings – walking down a road or looking sad in the rain. There’s no human discourse on there.
The writer of Walk My Walk is credited as Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor, but they have not stepped forward and claimed credit for the song’s success. They might not even exist themselves. The name though, is associated with another musical venture called defbeatsai, which kind of gives the game away.
Still, significant proportions of US music consumers don’t seem to mind. Breaking Rust already has 2 million monthly Spotify listeners. And just look at the YouTube comments on the above video and weep – ‘masterpiece’, ‘My god, his voice is awesome. Beautiful yet heartbreaking’, ‘The greatest song ever!!!’
In a Newsweek article about Breaking Rust, Jason Palamara, an assistant professor of Music Technology at Indiana University seems distinctly unimpressed. “Despite the ‘stomp, clap, hey’ rhythms and acoustic-y sound, this song is heavily laden with some very techy production techniques. It was pretty obviously the product of AI.”
“The audio on every track sounds really compressed and still has this weird digital shimmer, especially evident in the vocals. Once you notice it you can’t not notice it.”
Palamara described it as “An advancement for agentic AI: the creation of a consistent vocal ‘character’ that can be reused again and again for multiple songs.”
Arguably, you could say that recent technological advances in music – the widespread use of AutoTune on vocals, the domination of the algorithm in deciding what music we even get to listen to – have softened us up for the moment when you genuinely don’t know whether a track has been generated by a human or a machine, a point which we can’t be far away from now, if it hasn’t already arrived.
Then it will be surely up to human artists to lean into the things that make them human: genuinely original voices, unexpected chord changes, unusual song structures – in other words, the things that made us fall in love with music in the first place.
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