There is a sub-bass on the third track that swells exactly the same way at 0:42 of every chorus. Not similar. Identical. The wave shape is a copy. You can hear it if you know to listen, and once you have, you can’t un-hear it.

For most of the last forty years, the producer’s signature was in the inconsistencies. The way the snare landed three milliseconds early when the player got nervous. The way a vocal compressor breathed at the end of a long held note. Those were fingerprints. They were also, quietly, what we meant when we said a record sounded human.

The current generation of generative production tools doesn’t introduce those fingerprints. It cleans them up. The compressor breathes the same way every time. The snare is locked. The room is rendered. Everything is in tune.

I don’t think this is bad, exactly. I think it is different in a way the discourse hasn’t named yet.

A record produced this way has a very particular texture: smooth, full, dense, weightless. It is the sound of effort that nobody had to make. Some of it is beautiful. Some of it sounds like nothing was ever at stake.

The artists I’m most interested in right now are the ones who notice the smoothness and choose to put friction back. Not as nostalgia. As decision. A vocal that’s a little flat. A handclap that’s a little late. The decision says: I’m here, I made this, I could have made it perfect and didn’t.

The records that move me most this year are records where someone thought about texture as ethics. The presence of a person, audible in the seams.

The sub-bass on that third track will probably do well. It’s clean and it’s loud and it’s correctly placed in the mix. I will not be playing it again.