After 16 Years of Making Music, Amanda Magellan Finds Her Breakout Moment

Written By Marcus Lawrence

Amanda Magellan didn't think she was going to win SSC8. Her aspirations only reached as high as reaching the finals (the Top 40).

She is, by her own description, "not one of the popular ones" in the AI music world — a small streamer, a modest creator, a longtime producer whose taste runs well outside the mainstream.

Her song entry, "Starfall," had a fraction of the plays and likes that many of the other finalists had heading into the final weekend.

Then she won. By a lot.

"It's insane," Magellan said in the final moments of the SSC8 results livestream. "I just want to congratulate everyone who was in the finals because, man, your songs were amazing. This result is insane to me."

Magellan, representing Brazil, was announced the winner of SSC8 on Saturday, May 9, capping an eight-week competition cycle that drew nearly 500 songs from more than 50 countries. She finished with 455 points and a 43-point margin over the field — a dominating gap in a contest where second and third place were separated by just two points.

"Of course I wanted the song to go far, but I never expected the success it achieved," she said. "It means more than I can say, and I'm sure these moments will stay with me, in my heart, well into the upcoming decades."

Amanda Magellan

"Starfall" is a cinematic, emotionally charged anthem about love that lingers long after loss, pairing vulnerable lyrics and cosmic imagery with orchestral EDM production. A Latin choir carries the bridge, and the track builds toward a sweeping, arena-scale climax before pulling back into quieter orchestration.

"It's about love stubborn enough to outlast time and space, those rare connections that feel written in the stars, even when reality gets messy," she shares. "It's deliberately over-the-top, designed to send listeners upwards and outwards with a real sense of cosmic scale."

She wanted it big, epic, and exhilarating, layered with a nostalgic nod to '00s trance EDM festivals. The lyrics, she noted, are deliberately simple.

But now the stars whisper from above
Shattering my heart, brittle from the doubt
The sky now cries over our love
Falling from your heaven, rolling from the clouds

"There's almost no storytelling; the focus was the sound and the feelings it evokes."

The song took two months to build, and Magellan describes it as a "Frankensong", assembled from the best parts of melodies she'd saved from older projects, pieces she loved too much to throw away.

The Contest That Opened the Door

Magellan is a trained musician, who has been making music for 16 years, but everything shifted around May 2024, when she started experimenting in earnest with Suno and Udio.

For a long time, she made AI music in a vacuum, unaware that Discord communities were forming around the platforms. The occasional post on the Suno subreddit was the extent of her engagement with other creators.

It took months before she realized there was anything beyond the official Suno Discord server and Subreddit — and that's where she first heard about SSC.

She quickly entered SSC7 on a whim just to see what the fuss was about. The doors blew open from there.

"It introduced me to creators who have since become musical partners, fellow staff members, collaborators on projects, and genuinely good friends," she said.

READ: SSC - The Song Contest That is Becoming AI Music's Global Stage

In the year that followed, she joined the SSC8 planning team, helped build the Discord server AI Music Embassy to unite leaders in the space, recorded a podcast with Matt St. Onge from the YouTube channel AI DIY The AI Music Guy, and co-launched the Ravestream on Twitch with fellow SSC committee member Itai "I+AI" Leibowitz.

"It's a domino effect," she said. "You meet one person, they introduce you to the next, and before you know it, you've grown more than you thought possible."

To that end, the contrast between SSC7 and SSC8, she said, could not be sharper. She went all in: committee member, captain of one of the 15 bunks (preliminary contained rounds of competitors), and a fully intentional entry. Even so, simply reaching the finals felt like the prize.

Building Worlds Beyond SSC

The "Amanda Magellan" behind the music isn't a pseudonym — it's her real name. She appears onscreen as her true self, and says the AI-generated face fronting the project is built from an actual photo of her, "close enough to my real features that people who know me in person will say 'she looks just like you.' That's exactly how I want it."

Outside of SSC, Magellan is the creative lead — the “architect,” in her words — of RVSTGΛRDEN, a project she describes as “Neo-Baroque Victoriandustrial”: a collision of confessional rawness and industrial clank.

She handles the lyrics and production; generative AI builds out the virtual visage and fractured vocal identity of the project’s persona, Viatrix Vermilivn. The workflow, she said, depends on “surgical human vision” directing the machine, then inviting it to “play a role” — producing textures where harpsichords corrode into circuitry and alt-rock meets industrial sounds.

The debut single, “Poison Garden,” released March 25, 2026, is the project’s blueprint. Vermilivn’s vocals are “brutally feminine” and “fractured at the edges.” The lyrics turn on betrayal and emotional resilience — a garden where, as one line goes, “they water your wounds with crocodile tears.” Far from the emotion-driven lyrics of her SSC-winning song, Vermilivn's songs are rich with narrative. Everything is structured around “transmissions,” with future releases described as “archives” and, as she puts it, "new worlds being assembled from rust and resonance."

Magellan also hosts Monday Madness, a weekly rock and metal listening stream on the TRA Studio Discord server, running every Monday night from 7 p.m. EST until around midnight.

Sharing music, she said, is something she loves deeply — and the stream is just the start. "At some point I'd love to branch out into other genres I'm passionate about — maybe even gaming, which has been a fixture in my life since childhood. Thirty-hour days, anyone?"

For all of it — RVSTGΛRDEN, the streams, the committee work, the community — Magellan keeps coming back to the same quiet surprise: that people are listening at all.

"I've always made music for myself first, not for any imagined audience," she said. "When people genuinely resonate with that, it catches me off guard every time in the best way. Slowly but surely, I'm finding my tribe."

SSC has announced it will return in the fall for SSC9. By then, Magellan's story will already be enshrined in the contest's mythology: the small creator, the strange overbuilt song, and the community that turned both into something bigger.

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Marcus Lawrence
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