Formerly Volume One · est. Hampshire, 20-odd years ago

Smith & Hazzard

Twenty years late. Finally on time.

We wrote these songs half a lifetime ago, in Ricky's dining room in Hampshire, as a band called Volume One. Life got in the way before most of them were ever finished. We're finishing them now — two older men, two hundred miles between us, and a much better set of tools than we had in our thirties and forties.

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How we work with AI

Every song here has 100% human-written lyrics, at the very least. Most are original compositions we wrote and recorded twenty odd years ago, now re-performed with the help of AI - same song, better sound than we ever managed at the time. Others are new, with AI helping build the music from scratch under our direction: hours of curating, listening, and re-doing until it's right, not - and never<\b> - one click and done.

We disclose here and everywhere EXACTLY what AI did and didn't do on every single release, in full, in the log. Nothing vague, nothing hidden.

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Latest release

Fallen Angels

Released September 11th 2026 · original composition

So this track was originally written and recorded in 2008!!
You can find it at Soundclick Volume One where it's been since January 2009.
It went straight to the Soundclick Rock and Rock General charts at NUMBER 1 and stayed there for a little while.
We were very chuffed.

The song itself is a dark, apocalyptic warning about humanity, religious extremism, war and the manipulation of belief.
It's not an anti-religion song, more a condemnation of what humans do with religion, power and certainty. Especially when people convince themselves that they're acting on behalf of God.

See everything we've released →

The short version

Ricky and Sam played together as Volume One in Hampshire in the [early 2000s], gigging locally and recording everything themselves, right down to uploading tracks to SoundClick back when that was the only option going. Then life happened, as it does. Two decades on, one of us has moved to Lincolnshire, neither of us can gig the way we used to, and we've finally sat down to finish what we started - using Suno, carefully and transparently, to help us get there.

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