Draugveil's album faces AI allegations

The Sun

02-07-2025

ART exists to invoke a response, elicit a reaction and move the observer. The spectrum on where these land on does not matter, whether it provokes anger, thought, laughter or discussion. Ultimately anything is better than bland art, which is akin to a glass of milk at room temperature. In black metal, due to its anti-establishment and misanthropic nature, art in this circle only has room to incite the most extreme reaction. That said, the metal and black metal community were simply not ready for how they themselves would respond when Draugveil's Cruel World of Dreams and Fears arrived last month.
Released by the prominent underground music promoter Black Metal Promotion on YouTube in its entirety, the album blew up instantly not due to the music, the artiste behind it or their politics, or even the subgenre. It was the album's cover art that shot it to infamy.
Hollow imitation
Cruel World of Dreams and Fears itself is a relatively bog standard album within the subgenre, liberally taking from different generations of black metal, without actually etching an identity of its own through the music. The 10-track album bears gratuitous similarities to other projects such as the older Satanic Warmaster and newer ones such as Kristailer, Kekht Arakh, Lamp of Murmuur and even Gudsforladt.
Though it is inevitable for chords, arrangements and such to be 'lifted' from other projects' albums, which Draugveil does for his debut, there is nothing in Cruel World that stands out. To make matters worse with the music lacking an identity, the lyricism goes to the other extreme end of black metal in a failed effort to replicate Kekht Arakh's 'romantic black metal'.
'Forgive me Lord for all my sins / Forgive me Father, cause I'm weak / I had no time to figure out / That all I need is love' – Draugveil sings in one of the weirdest recurring passages in the album's opener Knight Without a Name.
Musically, the songs were not terrible by any means. It is uniformly good but only worth a single spin through the entire album as it is neither groundbreaking nor is it able to summon longevity from the artiste's name alone unlike what many of the subgenre's established acts are able to do.
Shroedinger's black metal
The cover for the album is a thing of beauty and the stuff of nightmares. It just depends on the lens it is seen through. On one hand, it is brave for going against the subgenre's norm for cover art. On the other, it can be interpreted as being too comical that Draugveil has pushed himself into the cringe corner of black metal.
After the cover art summoned the hate-filled eyes of black metal fans, their ears soon followed the galloping riffs of the album. With the weight of armoured hell beasts, fans of the subgenre poured heavy scrutiny on the Czech Republic artiste's album.
What followed were the allegations that the album cover was generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and then, that the music itself was possibly also AI-generated, as the album is Draugveil's debut, with no previous singles, EPs or demos. Artistes and albums falling out of the sky without prior history or background are usually tell-tale signs of AI.
The lyrics for the songs on the album also share similar genetics to the slop AI is known to vomit out, particularly the grammar and how often the em dash symbol is used.
Though AI-generated slop has not flooded the metal scene, it is prevalent in more niche subgenres such as dungeon synth, which was born from black metal. It is hard to say whether the cover or music for Draugveil's debut is AI, but it does not change the fact that the album is, in modern slang, very 'mid'.