'Rise Slow' Preaches Patience, and Kimo Sounds Put Out 161 Releases in Four Months

On 23 September, 'Rise Slow' by Kimo Sounds was No. 15 on Shazam's global chart and in the top 50 of 29 of the 70 country charts Shazam publishes. It was No. 3 in Portugal and in Russia, No. 5 in Switzerland, No. 7 in Mexico and No. 8 in Germany. It went up on YouTube on 8 May and on the streaming services on 19 May, so it is more than four months old and still near the top.

The song is about exactly that: getting somewhere slowly, without shortcuts. The act behind it has not been slow at all. Deezer lists 161 Kimo Sounds releases between 19 May and 18 September, and 13 of them came out on a single day, 29 July. This piece is about that gap, between what the song says and how it was made.

Is Kimo Sounds AI? The channel already answers

It is the first thing people ask. On 23 September, Google's suggestions after the name included 'is kimo sounds a real person', 'is kimo sounds ai' and 'who is the voice of kimo sounds'. The answer is on the channel itself. The description under the 'Rise Slow' video ends with the line 'AI-assisted music creation', and YouTube's 'How this was made' panel on the same page says 'Made with AI', noting that sounds or visuals were altered or fully generated.

We checked all 120 public videos on the channel the same day. The 'Made with AI' panel is on 111 of them. The written line is on 56, all posted between 7 May and 26 June; none of the 55 videos posted since 1 July has it, though 53 of those still carry the panel. Only three videos have neither: one audio upload from May and two September tracks shared with another act, DIAZ.

So 'is it AI?' gets a plain yes from the source. What the channel does not say is who is behind it. It lists Morocco as its country, it was set up in late April 2026, and its only contact is a business email address. In its replies under the video it writes in the first person, about 'my music' and 'my creation'. We found no name, no face and no interview, and we are not going to guess. The same question hangs over Imael Angel's 'Bad Times', where we found no statement either way.

A song against shortcuts

The lyric spends about four minutes making one point. It opens on the title, sung twice, then humming, before any story starts.

The first verse is set in the dark. The singer describes long nights nobody witnessed, holding on without a word, and finding a way forward without needing anything to see it by. It is a picture of effort that no one applauded.

Then comes a short list of refusals: not quick, not noisy, not performed for an audience. What the singer wants instead is something genuine, something with depth, and something kept private.

The chorus is the thesis. The climb is slow, but it is sure and strong. Old wounds are counted as gains rather than damage, and the wait is accepted as the cost of arriving: the singer needed that long, and now has a place.

The second verse turns to the people who wanted something else. They asked for spectacle and speed; the singer answered with roots and honesty. There were more falls than the singer likes to admit, and each one showed where to stand.

The bridge turns all this into a rule about everyone else: whoever climbs fast comes down just as fast, and whoever climbs slowly is made to last. At the end of the last chorus, the word 'belong' comes back four times, and the track closes on the idea that the singer is still climbing and has not gone anywhere.

Searches in Indonesian ask 'rise slow artinya', what it means, and Russian ones ask for a translation. In plain English, 'rise slow' is a shortened 'rise slowly': grow a little at a time. Apart from the title and the word 'belong', nothing here quotes the lyric; the words are on the streaming services.

The music keeps a steady, unhurried walk. We measured the official upload at 123 beats per minute, an ordinary deep house pace, and after a quieter first half-minute it stays near full level. It falls to a little over half once, between about 2:25 and 2:54, and comes back for the final choruses.

161 releases, 13 of them on 29 July

Now set that lyric beside the release list. Deezer shows 161 Kimo Sounds releases from 19 May to 18 September 2026: 160 singles and one EP. There were 25 in the last 13 days of May, 47 in June and 66 in July, then 16 in August and 7 so far in September. Eleven came out on 11 July and 13 on 29 July. Thirty-two titles appear twice, on different dates.

'Rise Slow' itself exists four times under the Kimo Sounds name: the original, a bass-boosted version on 27 May, a 'Rise Sloww' with an extra w on 30 July that runs 4:19 instead of 3:54 under a different label name, and an 'Alok Remix' on 21 August. The title has also become crowded. On 23 September, Apple Music's catalogue search returned songs called 'Rise Slow' from 55 other artist names released after 19 May, a Spanish version among them; only 14 had used the title before. The original is the 19 May single credited to Kimo Sounds alone.

The remix is the one credit we could not settle. Spotify credits it to Kimo Sounds, AIRES BLU and Alok, and links the Alok name to the Brazilian DJ's profile, which has 24.4 million monthly listeners. Deezer links the same credit to a second Alok page that mixes Indian-language singles with a few dance releases, and the remix is not among the 290 releases on the Brazilian DJ's own Deezer page. We found no post from Alok about it. Credits are supplied to the services by distributors, so one service may simply have it filed wrong; the mismatch proves nothing either way.

Speed is normal for AI music. Being played is not. Deezer said on 21 July that it was receiving about 90,000 fully AI-generated tracks a day, more than half of all new uploads, and that such tracks made up only 1 to 3 percent of what its users stream. 'Rise Slow' sits in the small part that people actually play. How much of a hit song the tools can reproduce is something we tested ourselves, with an AI copy of 'Bad Times'.

Inside the catalogue, the success is just as narrow. The 120 public videos had 92.4 million views between them on 23 September. The original 'Rise Slow' video had 28.9 million and the bass-boosted one 8.2 million, 40 percent of the total together. The next biggest, 'Pieces Of Me', had 6.1 million. Apart from 'Rise Slow', the only Kimo Sounds song on any Shazam country chart that day was 'Make It Spectacular', in the top 200 of eight countries and no higher than No. 68, in Israel.

Who is dancing to it

Of the 40 comments YouTube ranked first under the 'Rise Slow' video on 23 September, 12 give the writer's age. Every one of those ages is between 50 and 83. Four comments mention that the music is made with AI, and none of the four objects. Four say where they first heard it: Instagram twice, TikTok and Facebook once each.

That is a small sample, and people who mention their age may be the ones most surprised to like a deep house track. Still, not one of the 12 is under 50. The song is also missing from one big chart: it is not in Shazam's United States top 200 at all, while it is No. 56 in the United Kingdom.

Does it practise what it preaches?

For the song itself, yes. 'Rise Slow' has been out for four and a half months and is still No. 15 on Shazam worldwide, with its best positions today in Portugal and Russia. For the catalogue around it, no: 160 other releases in the same four months, almost none of which any chart has noticed. The patience is in the lyric and in the people playing it. The making was fast, and the channel says plainly that it was done with AI.