Charli xcx's producers used AI plugin Concatenator to build No One Lasts Forever

Charli xcx’s “No One Lasts Forever,” from her new album Music, Fashion, Film, got its glitchy second half from an AI plugin. Producers AG Cook and Finn Keane ran a studio jam session through Concatenator, an AI “audio mosaicing” tool by DataMind Audio, Cook revealed on the Tape Notes podcast with Charli and Keane.

One of pop’s biggest records of 2026 now has a documented AI plugin in its credits. And the way it was used says a lot about where AI actually fits in a pro session.

How AG Cook used Concatenator on the track

Cook and Keane started with a hardware jam. “We were running around the studio with as many things plugged in as possible just doing the worst sounds, trying to find the ugliest things,” Cook told Tape Notes, via MusicRadar. The pool included MS-20, Vermona, and Prophet recordings.

Chopping the jam by hand felt predictable to Cook. So he loaded the files into Concatenator and let the plugin rebuild a drum loop from hundreds of tiny fragments, comparing the glitchy result to skipping through stations on a radio dial. The whole second half of the track uses pieces of the session.

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It was a nice way of being able to sample tons of stuff in this really ambiguous, uncanny way that I tend to like. It's a mix of selecting little regions and letting some bits be chaotic and random and very 3D.

How DataMind Audio’s Concatenator works

Concatenator uses machine learning for concatenative synthesis, an approach closer to a hyperactive sampler than a song generator. It analyzes your sample library and indexes every sound by timbre, pitch, and amplitude, displayed as a mosaic in the plugin’s interface. Play audio into it, and it rebuilds the input in real time by stitching together the fragments from your library closest to the incoming sound.

The key detail: it only uses audio you feed it. The output on “No One Lasts Forever” is 100% Cook and Keane’s own jam, rearranged. It joins a wave of sample-level AI tools like Output’s Co-Producer and Splice’s Variations aimed at producers who want AI inside the workflow without outsourcing the writing.

Where “No One Lasts Forever” sits on the AI-assisted spectrum

Under the AI chart eligibility rules the major labels proposed in July, this is the model case for AI-assisted music: human songwriting, human performances, and an AI tool doing sound design on self-recorded audio. Nothing about it threatens the track’s chart standing.

It’s also a useful counterweight to the discourse. The same week producers accuse major releases of hidden AI generation, one of pop’s most influential production teams walked through its AI use openly, on tape, fragment by fragment. Transparency like this is what makes the assisted-versus-generated line workable at all.