Track listing: Beep Bop Boop (Ft. ai12die), Underwear (Ft. ai12die), Like a Fish To Water (Ft. Gina Da Lesbian), Which Way Will I Go? (Ft. ai12die), The Dust God (Remix) (Ft. Gina Da Lesbian), Zero (Ft. ai12die) & Gina Da Lesbian, Statement (Ft. ai12die), Golden Retrievers (Ft. Gina Da Lesbian), Alive (Ft. Gina Da Lesbian & ai12die), The Juices (Ft. ai12die), Gems Of Genesis (Ft. ai12die & Gina Da Lesbian), Clarify (Ft. ai12die), Life Goes So Fast (Ft. ai12die), Swimming With Sharks (Ft. ai12die), Chakra Flow (Ft. ai12die)
"¡Allá viene la tormenta!" It's one of the final lines of the original Terminator. Sarah Connor knew the storm of Artificial Intelligence was on its way but she had no idea that it before it tried to takeover the world, it would first infiltrate the Fine Arts. And today, in 2026, the ever-present question with music, photography, and video is: is that real or AI? And some artists try to hide it. Some choose to hide behind it. But not Charles Luck, better known as Black Astronaut Records. When he reached out to me to talk about his latest record ai12die, he was straight up about it:
"The words are me. The voice is me and AI. I am the flowmaster. The music is my curation.
ai12die is a sentient musical ai and he is suicidal because everyone hates him because he is the best rapper alive.
In a way, it's not unlike the way he's always released music. From Day 1 Luck has been a lyricist. He writes lyrics the way most people eat, sleep, and breathe. It's constant. Manic, almost. He's one of those people whose creative energy is a firehose that you can't shut off.
But in the past, Luck would pull-in guest rappers including his go-to musical brother, Tino Red. "Tino is the McCartney to my Lennon," Charles recently explained. They're a team. But when it came to ai12die, he wanted to try something different. He's in his studio, he's got lyrics. All he needs is a voice and some beats. Enter: our friend Artificial Intelligence. Luck is really quiet about which AI music generator he's found to be the best but he's worked with this new partner and ai12die is the result.
Some of the record is damn near Hyper Pop. The opening track "Beep Bop Boop" is frenetic. "Which Way Will I Go?" brings a similar vibe, with our AI emcee spittin' rhymes at a speed that edges out the fastest Twistas, Bustas & Bizzy Bones humanity has to offer.
And it's not just like Luck emailed his lyrics into a black box and it spat out the mastered finals. Nah. When he says "the music is my curation" means just that. Whereas you might hire a session guitarist and ask them to record 20 takes, then you choose the best, Charles coaxes all he can out of his robotic DJ. The song arrangement still needs to be decided on. A human decides if a "take" is good enough. And sometimes, no matter what you tell the bits and bytes, AI gonna do what it's gonna do.
Example? There's more than one N-bomb on this record. And that wasn't by choice. The musical version of an LLM, based on the context of the music and lyrics, decided that's what it needed to say. And it was unrelenting. So take those drops with a grain of salt. Call it artistic license, if a computer has such a thing?
So throughout the album you do get some human vocals. Charles Luck did record himself rapping. And then he split vocal duties with his featured AI-rappers ai12die and Gina Da Lesbian.
All the AI discussion aside, ai12die has some powerful, creative, well-written rhymes. Luck is typically all over the place, topically, and he doesn't disappoint this time around. "If you're scared out there, see them in their underwear." He spits about everything from rotary phones to zoo animals, drugs to Pegasus.
No, ai12die, isn't the most organic, human-grown, most OG rap album ever created. But it is a collection of very human lyrics, purposefully and intentionally set to music channeled through voices that were "e-auditioned" to see who would rap on each track. And among the sea of AI-generated music that appears in my Inbox, Black Astronaut Records has done the best job I've heard so far of someone leaning on AI, yet without killing the humanity of the sounds they're creating. Give it a listen...before the real storm comes.