He wrote these lyrics at 15. A health scare thirty-five years later finally pushed him to finish them.

Charles Toth started writing songs the way a lot of teenagers do — alone in his room, guitar on his knee, more feeling than skill. He was fifteen, living in Brisbane, and had no plan for those lyrics beyond getting them out of his head and onto paper. He kept playing for years. He never recorded a single one.

Life did what life does. He became a father of three. He took a job as a retail assistant at Coles. The notebook of songs stayed exactly where it was — in his memory, mostly, occasionally on paper — for thirty-five years. Then came a health scare that reframed everything about how much time actually feels like it's left.

“After a health scare I decided it's time to get them out into the world, and as I am physically unable to play them now I decided to give AI a try.”

From a Facebook ad to a finished album

Charles wasn't chasing a music career, and he wasn't looking to become a prompt engineer either. He saw an ad for RockAgent on Facebook, decided to give it a shot, and "loved the result." What followed was five days that took him from a lifetime of unfinished business to a fully released, fifteen-track metalcore album under an artist name he'd been holding onto since high school: Spectral Ruin.

"Was always the name I wanted if I ever made a band in high school," he says of the identity. It's a detail that says a lot about how RockAgent works best — not as a shortcut around the artist, but as the missing production crew for an artist who already existed, fully formed, decades before the tool did.

Getting the voice right — and rewriting a song from a woman's point of view

The most surprising part of the process for Charles wasn't the songwriting — it was how much direction actually mattered. "It took a couple of false starts before I figured out how to get the various vocal lines like I wanted," he explains. He tried male vocals first. It didn't feel right. Switching to a female vocalist got him closer to the sound in his head — which meant rewriting some of his own decades-old lyrics, including the track "Seven," from a male perspective to a female one.

That's not a small creative compromise. It's evidence of an artist actively steering the tool rather than the other way around — treating AI-assisted production the way any producer treats a session: adjust, rewrite, try again, until it matches the vision.

“A total head rush. Felt that my music is finally on the internet for the world to listen to.”

What he'd tell the skeptics

Charles is candid about the skepticism around AI-made music, and he's thought about it from an angle that's easy to miss if you haven't lived it. "If someone is physically or verbally unable to play or sing, then AI maybe the way for them to get their thoughts, hopes and dreams out into the world," he says. For Charles specifically, that's not hypothetical — it's the exact reason Spectral Ruin exists at all.

He's planning to share the album with a small, deliberately chosen group first: coworkers who aren't family, people he can trust for an honest reaction rather than a polite one. He calls Spectral Ruin "a hobby, for the most part" — the point was never fame. It was getting three and a half decades of thoughts out of his head and into the world, in the loudest, most aggressive genre he could find for them.

“Cathartic release after my health scare, and some closure. I may release some more — we'll see how it goes with this initial release.”