A Struggling Artist Used Suno Hundreds of Times on One Song. The Result Actually Works.
1010Benja fed his own vocals and lyrics into an AI music tool, edited the output, fed it back in, and repeated that cycle roughly three hundred times. The song is good. That is the uncomfortable part.
Key points
- Artist 1010Benja used Suno, an AI music-generation tool, to produce the opening track of his 2025 EP Time Has Nothing To Do With What You Choose...
- Benja wrote the lyrics, recorded his own vocals, and ran the material through Suno and the editing software Ableton in a back-and-forth cycle he estimates he repeated a few hundred times.
- Streaming service Deezer flags the song as AI-generated; Benja says he is not hiding that fact.
- Benja earned a Best New Music pick from Pitchfork for his previous record Ten Total in 2024, yet describes missing rent payments and periods of homelessness.
- The writer who reviewed the track for The Verge AI says it is the first Suno output he has genuinely enjoyed.
Most music made with generative AI, software that creates new audio from a text or audio prompt, sounds like wallpaper. Suno, one of the most widely used tools in that category, has a reputation for producing what critics call "slop": technically passable, emotionally hollow tracks that all blur together.
Then there is "Semiramis' Dream."
The opening track on 1010Benja's new EP hits with a jungle beat and Benja's own voice right at the front. It sounds alive. You would not immediately guess that Suno touched it.
The process Benja used is not the usual drag-and-drop. He wrote the lyrics himself. His collaborator Patrick Holder built the beat. Benja recorded his own vocals. Then they fed those elements into Suno, took whatever came back, pulled it into Ableton (a professional music-editing program), reworked it, and pushed it back into Suno. He estimates he did that cycle a few hundred times for this one song alone.
The most obviously synthetic element is the choir of backing voices. But hyperpop, a genre built around heavily processed, deliberately unnatural-sounding vocals, has trained listeners to accept exactly that texture. By choosing a style where artificial sounds are normal, Benja made the AI parts easy to miss.
He is not trying to hide any of this. "We're not hiding it. We don't feel any shame about it," he told music publication Hearing Things. Deezer, the streaming platform, marks the track as AI-generated in its metadata.
Benja is also clear-eyed about the cost. He acknowledges that large-scale AI systems consume significant electricity and that the environmental damage is real. His position is not triumphant. "The good guy doesn't win this one," he said. He uses the tool because he cannot afford the alternative. A professional children's choir is not in the budget of an artist who has been unable to pay rent.
That tension is worth sitting with. Benja could likely have produced something similar using layered vocal takes and smart processing, without Suno at all. The AI choir is not particularly convincing on close listening. The song works mostly because of his own voice, his own lyrics, and his own persistence across hundreds of iterations.
Does this change anything for independent musicians?
Not immediately, but it does clarify where the ceiling sits. Suno used this way is less a shortcut and more an extremely labour-intensive substitute for studio time an artist cannot afford. The tool did not replace Benja's creative work. It absorbed hundreds of hours of it.
For listeners, the practical takeaway is simple: AI-assisted does not automatically mean low-effort or dishonest. Check the credits, and let your ears decide.
