PROJECT

AI Heavy Metal Christmas Concept Album

Overview

AI is on the rise, and with that comes an expansive assortment of tools being created to generate content. Suno AI is one of those such things. At Christmas time in 2024, I realised that I keep listening to the same small assortment of metal Christmas songs every year, and some of those aren’t the best songs ever. I decided I wanted to have a go at making decent Christmas songs, so in this project, I’ll walk you through how I made an entire heavy metal Christmas concept album from start to finish.

Music

To start this, I paid for a subscription to Suno AI. The free-tier of Suno both limits you to 10 generations per day but also can’t be used outside of private use. I wanted to use as many credits as I needed, and I want to upload it to YouTube, so the paid version was the obvious version. Suno: https://suno.com

To make the music, I used the normal “song description” section, I didn’t use custom mode, unless the lyrics generated in the basic mode needed tweaking. I wanted to detail a story of Santa fighting hordes of evil Goblins to save Christmas, so I made each song a step along that story. I kept working on the songs until there were generations that I liked that had the right lyrics and sound.

Audio Edit

Some tracks might have needed some audio cut off the end, or a transition added subtly to allow for the song to end where in the generation it didn’t. To do this, I used Audacity. I use Audacity because it’s free, fast, and has all the audio features I’d need and more. It’s a highly recommendable piece of software.

I first downloaded WAV files from Suno (which you can’t do with the free-tier, either) and simply did any audio tweaks in Audacity and re-exported more WAVs.

Audacity: https://www.audacityteam.org/

Album covers

I used my self-hosted Stable Diffusion to make the song image covers for this. I wanted to have a darker tone and not a happy and bright conventional Christmas themed images, because, well…. goblins. I chose to keep the tone consistent by using a single checkpoint for all images: Darksun. I like the way it looks and as you can see from the song covers, can make some really cool pictures. It’s got a gritty element to it and looks better for fantasy images of this kind. I also found that it just simply gave me what I wanted over other checkpoints. Below are some examples from other users.

My generation workflow was fairly basic: Generate a 512×512 basic image that overall, looked nice. After that, if I were lucky, a simple SD Ultimate Upscale gave me my final image. In cases with multiple subjects, I generally had to inpaint the faces setting “Inpaint Area” to “Only Masked”. After that, and potentially some general inpainting, then I upscaled it.

The hardest time I had was actually with “11 – Santa’s Ballad”. I had a version with only three fingers and a thumb wrapping around the sword for a long long time. I tried inpainting an extra finger with all sorts of methods, and none of them worked more than 60% of what I needed. In the end I had to simply go with a different image from the same batch.

Narration

Narration for the intro poems were actually written normally by myself, there was no AI involved in that aside from the background music. I generated an instrumental for creepy Christmas music to lay underneath the narration, and then wrote and recorded the poems. This was probably the most creative part of the whole process because a robot didn’t do it (ha!). It just needed a bit of EQ, some normalisation and some reverb and it was done.

Video Edit

Once I had the music, the song image and the intro poems recorded, it was time to assemble everything into individual videos. I wanted to create videos that had some sort of movement in them so that it wasn’t lazy and had a visual appeal. I edit these using Kdenlive, which is a free editing software. https://kdenlive.org/en/.

The track layout I chose to go with ended up being:

  • Final music track
  • The cover image resized to fit the frame for 16:9
  • FX layer
  • Text layer

The music was barely touched, it might have needed a fade transition here or there, but it wasn’t really edited at this stage. For the cover image, there was a fade in and fade out (usually) based on the song. If the song punched in, then there was a very small fade in, if the song built up slowly, then the fade was more gradual.

For the FX layer, I used two clips from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/. I used a dust clip, and a snow clip. I used the dust for… dusty videos, such as the first song showing the goblin king in his cave. The snow clip was interesting as I used that for both snow and wind effects by using a mix of chroma-key, re-colouring, and in the case of the wind, rotation and a box blur.

The text simply faded in and out with the main image, usually. I experimented the most with the settings for the effects, but I got them to place I was happy with.

The poem intros were very simple to edit, too: music, narration, a bloody messy present image I generated & upscaled, and the typewriter text. The text was easier to do than I thought it would be, it’s simply text with the “Typewriter” option enabled in the title window. The image had a vignette on it, and that’s about it.

Outcomes

I uploaded four “packages” for this project to YouTube:

  • All tracks individually with the Christmas poem
  • All tracks with the Christmas poems combined into one mega video
  • All tracks individually with no Christmas poem
  • All tracks with no intro poems combined into one mega video

I put all the emphasis online to share about and tactically upload the individual song videos with poem intro in the 12 days leading up to Christmas, and after all that work…. the versions with no Christmas intro outperformed the others massively. The highest view count on one of the full videos with intros was “10 – Santa Vs the Goblin King” with 72 views and 1 like. The non-intro songs have multiple likes and a few with over 100 views. Finally, both mega videos horrible underperformed, having 5 total views combined.

Summary

This was a really fun project to work on and has given me plenty of Christmas listening material for 2025. The things that are possible with AI now are crazy and exciting – I released a concept album with artwork, and only with a single subscription. I think I’ll make more albums, but my takeaway, at least for now, is to simply just release the songs. Mega album videos don’t perform well, and the Christmas intros turned people away (looking at the analytics) before the song even came on. All in all, this was a great experience, and a hell of a lot of fun.