Broken Trails, an outlaw-country name with hundreds of thousands of monthly Spotify listeners, is very probably an AI-generated or heavily AI-assisted project rather than a singer with a public identity, RouteNote concluded in a piece published on 28 September. No one has been publicly confirmed as the voice or the operator behind it.
The act began releasing in 2025 and grew its catalogue unusually fast, with songs about perseverance and defiance such as Walk My Walk, Still I Stand and No Apologies. By August, Walk My Walk had passed four million Spotify plays, I Was Born This Way was nearing three million and No Rails had topped two million. Its Spotify profile bills it as outlaw blues and western soul, and an official website sells downloads, but neither introduces a person behind the name.
The case rests on circumstantial evidence rather than an admission. Zoundhub, which pulls release data from Spotify and Deezer, shows several Broken Trails albums, among them The Only Way Is Through, Watch Me Now and Running On Empty, carrying Deezer's AI-generated flag. Independent AI-music databases also class the project as AI, pointing to its release pace, artwork and missing biography, though RouteNote stresses that such detectors are supporting signals, not proof. That is short of the explicit label Apple Music gives Cain Walker.
People are involved somewhere: The Only Way Is Through credits Martin Coops as composer, with Broken Trails listed as producer. RouteNote notes that a writing credit does not reveal who controls the project or supplies the vocals, and that the creator has offered no account of how the music is made.
The piece ties the act to growing listener suspicion of Spotify profiles that appear overnight with polished images and huge catalogues but no trace of a real person. Spotify has begun adding AI Persona badges to profiles that present photorealistic AI-generated people, a label it says concerns the artist identity rather than whether the music itself was machine-made.
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