A Dazed Digital feature published on 8 October 2026 looks at two masked acts who have been climbing on TikTok and Spotify and who, once asked, confirmed that their voices are altered with Suno. The rapper Kilo Kent and the singer Zemi are both signed to the London label Isekai Records. The writer, Solomon PM, set out to find out whether they were the kind of mass-produced machine music people call slop, and came away with an answer he describes as less clear-cut than that.
The starting point was "40's", a polished trap-pop track by Kilo Kent that kept turning up in the writer's feed in lip-sync clips, in posts from accounts hailing him as the next big name and in his own anonymous promo videos. Commenters were convinced it was AI. The same scroll surfaced many similar masked acts, often Francophone Afro-RnB, with spotless vocals and a glossy finish. Zemi, Kilo's top related artist on Spotify, is fronted by an AI-generated avatar in a keffiyeh who sings French love songs in a desert setting. Some fans point out that it is AI; many appear not to notice or not to mind.
When the writer asked both for interviews, he discovered they share a label. Isekai describes itself as a next-generation outfit that turns social media buzz into streams, and it made its name in 2025 by signing the producer Haven. Haven's hit "I Run" was accused of using Suno to imitate Jorja Smith's voice, and Spotify took it down in November 2025 over impersonation concerns. Isekai re-released it with a human vocalist, and the new version has passed 250 million streams. A representative told the writer that nobody does marketing like they do.
“These can be fun experiments but they can also be very cynical commercial enterprises: if the musician doesn’t exist, the entire persona becomes a commodity”
Oliver Bown, associate professor, University of New South Wales, to Dazed · dazeddigital.com ↗
The interviews took place over video calls with cameras off, and neither artist gave a real name. Both were open about running their vocals through Suno and insisted the rest of the work is theirs. Zemi, who says he was born in Paris with Albanian roots, claims close to a billion streams as a producer for major pop names, though he will not say under what alias. He says he picked up Suno in 2025 to realise his own ideas without managing the egos of pop stars, and that he sings the songs himself, swaps the voice in Suno and mixes the result. He has since hired an actor to play him on social media. Kilo says he has written for UK rappers, never wanted the spotlight and began using Suno in early 2025 to disguise his voice. His comparison is that AI-assisted music is a dish you prepare yourself and merely put in the oven, as opposed to a supermarket microwave meal.
Both framed their work as sincere. Zemi says money is not what drives him: he describes a generation in a rough place, wants his songs to help people feel better, and says he would keep releasing music even with a hundred monthly listeners. Kilo makes a more competitive case. Suno is open to anyone with a browser and is even more accessible than auto-tune ever was, so in his telling the question is why he stands out from everyone else using it. His conclusion is that he must be doing something right.
The writer sets those claims against music's long history of arguments over what counts as authentic, from the reaction to Dylan going electric to complaints about dance music and auto-tune, and asks whether Suno is really any different. He also notes the other side: the energy and water demands of data centres, the appropriation of artists such as Jorja Smith without consent, and the ease with which an anonymous producer can adopt a racialised aesthetic while keeping their own background hidden.
To show how much of pop is already synthetic, the writer points to the freestyle rap videos that fill social feeds. They are scripted and lip-synced, recorded with punch-ins in a studio, treated with auto-tune and reverb and backed by machine-made instruments, yet nobody calls them fake. On that view Suno is one more tool in a line that includes the electric guitar and the pitch corrector. The article also mentions that the producer Sega Bodega has praised AI for cleaning up samples and subtly lifting the quality of his music, and that Bown sees uses beyond voices, such as quickly building a digital instrument or analysing a mix.
Oliver Bown, a music technology researcher at the University of New South Wales, told the writer there is no sharp boundary between AI-assisted and AI-generated work. It is a continuum running from small corrections to fully generated tracks. He also raised a worry about a future where a few actors can hook a generation on cultural content at the press of a button. He said he could not speak to whether this applies to Kilo Kent and Zemi, but that hiding the face invites that reading.
The piece ends on an awkward note. After the interviews, Isekai asked to vet the article before publication and, when the writer declined, accused him of building a false narrative and told him to cancel it. The writer says he believes the pair take their craft seriously but is bothered by the masks and secrecy, and that Zemi conceded he once tried pressing generate with no human input and people could tell. The writer speculates that the label may have wanted to reveal the Suno use on its own schedule, turning the story into publicity as it did with the Haven controversy. He adds that a public already anxious about AI, and about who profits from it, is poorly served by performers who hide behind masks. The feature names no upcoming date or decision; its conclusion is that the pair face a hard task persuading listeners they are the future.
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