A man will do anything to avoid editing his novel, and that includes inventing a band and releasing an album. Welcome to the world of Los Believos, a group of rural liberal arts college dropouts hoping to get their demo picked up by an experimental indie label. To help frame this better, let's have the group hail from Greenfield MA, make them a semester short from graduating Hampshire, and have their big dream be getting signed by Elephant Six.

Presenting the debut of Los Believos out on their own indie label Cosmic Wimpout:

Listen to Los Believos on Spotify, on Youtube, and on Suno.

The sound is open and airy, alternating between shaggy psych rock and gorgeously harmonized alt-country. The legendary Big Star sits underneath the Los Believos sound, but it travels backwards and forwards from CSN to Best Coast, from Primal Scream to Bardo Pond and beyond. This is home recording unshackled and free, exploring terrain both familiar and strange.

The irony of course is that this is all simulacra. As much as we want the four of them sharing a flophouse off Route 2A, there is no Los Believos. They're made possible by Suno 4.5, the wildly fun new AI music generation model that finally allows enough control and expression to make an album that sounds like a single band and their unique pastiche of blended influences.

Unlike past Starholder releases, we've leaned heavily on a single prompt to produce the band's sound:

loud quiet loud in folkdrone shoegazer, large lo-fi experimental bedroom recordings, rural psychedelica spacerock, looped and layered as melodic feedback

Suno has gotten a lot better at its expressiveness and ability to incorporate multiple aspects of a prompt without letting one dominate another, but there's still some driving bias. Folkdrone largely anchors songs in an acoustic mid-tempo rhythm. While the next prompt, large lo-fi experimental bedroom recordings, gives it that airy, shaggy structure and sound. Finally loud quiet loud and rural psychedelica are what let songs run off and get heavy in sections.

Part of my infatuation with Suno is that it is a model you can lean on in a lot of different ways. Most Gen AI is single payload prompting that fires in and returns an output. Standard approach in gen AI is to load a reference image and prompt, then let vector space take the wheel. With Suno, the prompt serves as a base terrain that's really wide, but then the lyrics and tags within the lyrics act as an added steering vehicle. The tone of the words, the structure of the song, adjectives in tags all act to summon expressiveness and narrow the sonic direction of a tune. Finally, there's the act of editing and extension. It's fast and cheap to generate multiple versions of a prompt, then it's on your ears to find the one that best matches what you are going for. From there, pick the point in the output where you want to intervene and guide it further. It's very much creative conversation via your ears and the word which goes well beyond what image and video can get you elsewhere.

For all you "taste is the new skill" AI pontificators out there, Suno is where that truism shines. It's a perfect mix of writing, editing and construction for me and a big reason why I have gotten so deep into making synthetic music.

Anyways on to the songs...

The song that started the project before it was a project. We open with heavy shades of Brian Jonestown crimping from Space Oddity, but that wasn't the intention. I was actually trying to see how good the speaking effect controls were in the new model, only to discover the sonic expressiveness of Suno 4.5 was big and varied. Anyway there is no real meaning to this tune, it's just trippy psych rock.

I'm supposed to be fixing my novel Hyperreal Hospitality. I'm also supposed to be finishing the last 4 music videos for the accompanying 22 song opus, the Hyperreal Hospitality Original Soundtrack so I can release the last AI music album I made while writing the book. I'm not supposed to be fucking around with the new Suno model, but nevertheless I was back at it two days later.

By now, I was developing a concept around these slackers and their stoner English major vibe is starting to grow. Cherry Cart Lane is about a local road that's supposedly bad luck mixed in with Calvino's The Baron In The Trees.

And now we are full blown into the weirdness of Los Believos. This is heavy Western Mass to Hudson Valley haunted Protestant history. Sometimes you'll drive around the Pioneer Valley out by Hadley and start coming on some really old historical markers in quiet corners of rural highways. Pay attention and one realizes how deep the history of the early colonial period is out there and that this land forms the initial push westward and our earliest atrocities against indigenous America. At Hampshire, Los Believos certainly got their fill of critical theory and Chomsky and are recasting the storybook of Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne in their own eerie folk version of Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

This track could also be called The Band Gets Really Into Delillo and John Prine. Probably the best track on Los Believos and certainly the only single the Cosmic Wimpout label will release from the album. This is a funny tune on a lot of levels. First, it's a non-partisan political track talking about how the government is never there for you in a disaster, but taking that and recasting it as emancipatory back to nature empowerment. Second, it's written as a talking short story with shades of White Noise underneath it, but in that matter of fact Prine narrative songwriting style. Finally, the lyric prompt is not structured at all. Sometimes if you just write a short story in Suno, it will handle the vocal arrangements and figure out when to change sound and tempo on its own. All of that hits here.

Here, There boils down to my AI doing Teenage Fanclub doing Big Star to make a song everyone under 40 will think is Band of Horses. Beautiful shimmering pop tinged with acid laced lyrics about the marriages of convenience that take place when there's not a lot to choose from. Sometimes new and jagged is better than comfy and known. A beautifully bittersweet mid-tempo pop song here.

How do I justify not working on the things I'm supposed to be working on and spiraling into new projects? By telling myself they all fit into the same world, that I am worldbuilding, and then sneaking hooks back into the new stuff. Huelva is Hyperreal Hospitality lore, telling the story of a key character in the book. Since we are in this vein, the name Los Believos is a shoutout to Los Olivos which is a key polis in the novel and definitely a place where a band like this would hail from. The vocal tradeoffs in here are a nice touch which reminds me of the Moldy Peaches and Vaselines.

This song rules. It's one of my favorites on the album even if it's not one of the better ones lyrically or in terms of its complete package. Anyway, the idea was to write a song about the band climbing a water tower on acid to watch the Fourth of July fireworks across the Pioneer Valley. That all changed when I caught the vocal hook just as the song really kicks in. When Amanda answers "oooh I'm in it yessss" I knew that the model would keep pulling back into that expressiveness and just turned this into a burner of a groove that has a heavy rural psych feel of Primal Scream's Loaded. Every band has that one song they can stretch for 20 mins live if needed and this is it. Also, I kept the whole being on acid conceit going. The part later in the track where Ben throws on his rockabilly daddy voice and says he can't do the verse kills me.

Los Believos are stoner contemporaries of David Foster Wallace, so it felt fitting to do a song about a TV show. The band is definitely spending too much time crashed on the couch watching weird shit and would have been deep into Twin Peaks. Audrey is of course Audrey Horne who I had a huge crush on at a formative age. The tricky part about writing this was finding a topic in the dark and jazzy world of Twin Peaks that would fit their sound. We solved for that by starting big and atmospheric, then going to the Owls, before meditating on the central question in all of David Lynch's work...What if love is not enough to keep the dark away? Finally we take a big creative liberty and give Ed and Norma a happy ending using a hallucination from Claude as the vehicle.

I almost didn't put this version of Audrey on the album because the sound felt too smooth and well produced for their home studio, but it was too strong not to. We end on them running a steel guitar through a Leslie Speaker and getting a big CSN meets countrified Gilmour-era Floyd anthem on. Los Believos gets No Depression and does their best Jayhawks here.

Listen to Los Believos on Spotify, on Youtube, and on Suno.