Last week a mail landed in the inbox that most metal sites would have deleted on the second paragraph. John F. Feliciano, a guitarist from Puerto Rico who says he cut his teeth in the 2000s rock-metal band DE’FEKT, sent us his new single “sick”. And then he did the thing nobody does: he told us how it was made. He writes the riff, the lyrics and the structure. The production gets finished in Suno. AI, named, in the pitch, unprompted.
whispertone is a hybrid rock project: human riffs and words, machine-finished production, and full disclosure about which is which. That last part is why you are reading about it here.
First, the song on its merits, because that was the whole point of asking. “sick” is a solid heavy-rock single. Loud, distorted guitars, a vocal that stays melodic while it snarls, a chorus built around “sick of being sick” that does its job. It is also, for the corners this site usually lives in, a bit mainstream: more radio muscle than underground teeth. A decent song. Not a revelation. I would say exactly the same if a label had mailed it.
Now the interesting part. We have spent weeks on this site documenting the other version of this story: fake songs pushed onto dead bands’ profiles, invented vintage catalogues, machines pretending to be people. The problem was never the machine. The problem is the lie. Feliciano is the control group: same tools, zero deception. The line between those two worlds is one honest sentence in a mail.
And fair is fair, so our own cards on the table: this site is made with AI assistance too. The taste, the verdicts, the corrections and the final word are mine, and the machine helps me get it on the page. If “sick” deserves to be judged on its merits with its workflow in the open, then so do we. That is the deal I think the whole scene is going to end up making, and the bands and writers who say it out loud will be the ones worth trusting.
So no, “sick” is not in the Inbox: that column curates underground releases, and this is a different conversation. But it earned something rarer here. It made the honest version of the future audible.
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Listen: “sick” on Spotify
