With KAMELOT's fourteenth album three weeks from release, Thomas Youngblood has given about the least equivocal answer a musician can give on generative A.I.: he hopes the whole thing burns itself out.
Asked by Jorge Botas of Portugal's Metal Global about artists using A.I. generators to produce melodies, harmonies and lyrics, the guitarist framed it as a fashion he expects to pass. "I could just tell you as just a general person, I have this weird feeling it's gonna run its course, whether it's using ChatGPT to ask how to answer an interview question or whatever it might be. I hope that it runs its course where people are, like, 'Nah, this is kind of not worth it. It's not worth the resources that it takes, all these things. Let's think for ourselves. Let's continue to do things old-school way.'"
For KAMELOT itself the question does not arise. "Obviously, 30 years of a career and fourteenth album, it's not something we would even entertain," he said. Asked whether he had ever been tempted to use it for an idea, the answer was flat: "No, not at all. The only time I've used it, I've taken all these tour dates and said, 'Make an itinerary for me.' But that's pretty much it."
What unsettles him is less the output than the feedback loop. "It's a little scary, too, because it starts to learn who you are based on your questions. It's weird. I'm not a fan. I hope it goes away, but the problem is people rely on these things, just like Google. We talked about Google years ago, how no one thinks for themselves. They Google it. So maybe it's just gonna be the next kind of iteration of Google, for example."
It is a familiar argument in metal right now, and the genre is far from united on it — FLOTSAM AND JETSAM's Eric "A.K." Knutson, interviewed the same week, took very nearly the opposite line.
KAMELOT release "Dark Asylum" on August 28 via Napalm Records. Two singles are out, "Ashen World" and "Godlike Alchemy". Longtime producer Sascha Paeth returned to helm the record, with Jacob Hansen handling mixing and mastering. Ignacia Fernández, the 28-year-old model crowned Miss World Chile 2025, guests on "Ashen World" and "Sanctuary".
The album runs to fifteen interconnected compositions that extend the RavenHill narrative, moving between orchestral passages and heavier guitar-driven material — a structure that makes the band's insistence on doing it the long way round rather more than a talking point.
Source: blabbermouth.net