Help! I Generated a Song With Google’s New Music Model and I Kind of Like It

Google has released Lyria 3.5, a new music generation model available through Google Flow Music, which the company says offers richer melodic structures, better lyrics, and more expressive vocals. A user testing the model accidentally generated a song titled "The Cartographer's Lung" that they found surprisingly enjoyable, despite the model's previous lack of popularity compared to competitors like Suno.

Back in February, Google acquired a music generator startup called Producer https://gizmodo.com/google-ai-slop-machine-coming-for-your-music-2000725892 . In April, Google rebranded https://9to5google.com/2026/04/20/producerai-becomes-google-flow-music/ Producer, turning it into Google Flow Music. That product has been available as part of the Google Labs suite. But, as is usually the case with such experiments, Google Flow Music hasn’t really set the world on fire with its popularity—even at a time when music generators like Suno have, for better or worse, made headlines https://www.404media.co/hack-reveals-suno-ai-music-generator-scraped-youtube-deezer-and-genius/ . But Google’s new music model, Lyria 3.5, has just been made available through Google Flow Music. In a blog post on Wednesday https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-labs/lyria-3-5/ , Google wrote that the Lyria 3.5 boasts, “richer, more complex melodic structures that sound more natural,” as well as lyrics that are supposed to adhere better to user prompts, and have better attentiveness to song structure. The vocals are supposed to be more expressive and “emotionally nuanced.” Users also get more control over the absolute bedrock basics of song creation: tempo and song length. As if to prove its point, the blog post comes with an embed of a YouTube video featuring an unnamed song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQkg3n5bwKQ in the genre I call Taco Bell pop. Y’know, the kind of not-quite-good-enough-to-be-on-the-radio pop you hear in Taco Bell, and see affiliated with Taco Bell https://www.tacobell.com/stories/feed-the-beat-2019 , and which makes you feel like you’ve just consumed Taco Bell for your ears? Everyone calls it that, right? The song is pleasant and the lyrics are about spinning around: But I already know I never want to hear this slop song again. However, the same can’t be said for the song I prompted into existence when I signed up for the service, which Google Flow Music named “The Cartographer’s Lung.” Note: The image below is not a clickable link. Click here to listen to “The Cartographer’s Lung” “The Cartographer’s Lung” was an accident. When you sign up for Google Flow Music and log in, it presents you with a chatbot interface and the bot says: “Welcome to the Studio I’m your Producer—-looking forward to making music together. Let’s lay down a beat or instrumental to get started. What have you been listening to recently?” I didn’t think answering this question was going to be a complete prompt for a song, so I tried to answer it honestly, telling it I had been listening to a lot of Black Midi lately. However, I figured it would probably not want to be steered toward imitating a specific band for copyright reasons, so I just wrote a long, rambling description of Black Midi partially cribbed from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black Midi without actually mentioning Black Midi. My description is horrible writing so pretend you never saw this: “I have been listening to rock that incorporates styles such as math rock, progressive rock, post-punk, and avant-jazz that is part of the “Windmill scene,” particularly the bands influenced by blah blah blah, cutting most of this which tends to have many, many words—often spoken very quickly, but sometimes slowly—telling an often disjointed, and often disturbing story.” I thought Google Flow Music was going to lay down a drum track or something, but instead it used that entire chunk of text as my prompt and created a whole song, then gave me options for refining it, which I never got around to doing. Here’s the link to “The Cartographer’s Lung” again https://www.flowmusic.app/song/48468486-c301-4866-b575-41e28d10c220 . It’s an F-minus-minus at sounding like Black Midi, which sounds like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfAOFyhfZJU&list=OLAK5uy kUzro9EulGZUsIl-Bvn8hnQmPZU0jpSHw frankly, I’m sorry I brought Black Midi into this , but it does sound a little like the early oughts band the Starlight Mints https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YVoSserolI&list=RD-YVoSserolI&start radio=1 , or it sounds like someone trying to make fun of the Starlight Mints. It’s a very bad song. The lyrics include lines like, “The map says turn at the third spleen / But here is only a field of rusted nails / The compass needle points directly down / Into the black lard of the soil,” which sound like one of the Mars Volta’s castoffs https://genius.com/The-mars-volta-drunkship-of-lanterns-lyrics . It pronounces the word cathedral “Cathy-drull.” But I like this terrible song. It reminds me of 2022, when AI products like this were wild and unpredictable https://gizmodo.com/dall-e-art-generator-ai-openai-1849591740 . And fun. It’s been four years since then, and AI-generated music gets slipped into streaming services now because it’s so safe and hard to notice. People generate it as a sort of get-rich-quick scheme https://www.reddit.com/r/passive income/comments/1kqx663/started from 300 ive made 3k5kmonth with ai music/ , or convince other people they’re authorities and try to become AI-content-generating gurus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5NmuQ Ec6I as a get-rich-quick scheme. The slop landscape is depressing and hollow. And unfortunately there’s no magical map that can get us back to the AI of 2022. As a wise AI once said, “The map is bleeding on my trousers / I have arrived at the dead center / The center is my own left lung.”