Listening – Cover Me!

The software that cloned Drake's and the Weeknd's voices is easy to use and impossible to shut down.

- By Lane Brown

IN 2021, five musicians from Hastings, England, noticed a hole in the market. “There were no massive rock bands making huge, catchy, stadium-worthy anthems,” says guitarist Chris Woodgates. So they started a group called Breezer and hit the recording studio. “We shared our songs with friends, and everybody told us, ‘This could be the new Oasis,’” says drummer Jon Claire. But while tracks such as “Alive” and “Forever” bore the obvious influence of Noel Gallagher’s early songwriting, and front man Bobby Geraghty sang through his nose like Liam Gallagher, Oasis-size success never materialized. “Breezer didn’t quite get the momentum we’d hoped for,” says Claire. They played their final live show last summer, or so they thought.

Then something weird happened. A few weeks ago, Geraghty was surfing YouTube and came across a series of videos in which someone had used brand-new generative AI software to mimic Liam’s voice and swap it into Oasis songs that had originally been sung by Noel—with uncanny results. “I wondered what it would be like to hear Liam sing our songs,” says Geraghty. He replaced his own voice in eight Breezer tracks with an AI-generated model of Liam’s. He uploaded the new versions to YouTube under the name aisis, billing them as an “alternate-reality concept album” by Oasis’s classic mid-’90s lineup.