A Watford band said they feel "livid and violated" after someone "took their album and tried to pass it off as their own".

Alternative metal band Assimilate, made up of Jake Aston, Jack Cox, Matt Bown and Chris Rush, all aged 26 to 29, couldn’t believe it when they noticed their album Suffer in Silence was racking up views on Spotify under another artist’s name.

They added that the past few days have been “surreal” as they have tried to get the tracks taken down.

Watford Observer:

Singer Jake said: “It came very unexpectedly, I got a message from a friend that’s a promoter in Hitchin who said 'I’ve just seen this are you involved with it?'.

“I noticed the album had songs titled very similarly to us and then noticed it was our album slightly slowed down and with the titles slightly changed. It was very strange.

“We were very confused, angry, and upset. I’d never heard of it happening before.”

Some of the titles on the reuploaded album, released on December 11 2022, are as little as one letter apart from the names Assimilate gave their music a year earlier.

Guitar player Matt, who works as a music teacher at West Herts College, said he was “absolutely livid” seeing their music being passed off as someone else’s.

“I was angry. I felt violated that someone had stolen our intellectual property,” he added.

After the band shared what had happened on Facebook, Jake said the support from the Watford music scene was “so positive and reaffirming”.

Through the post they were put in touch with someone who works at Spotify and the music has now been taken down from the platform.

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Jake added: “They were incredibly helpful. They worked really fast and managed to get it down and contacted the distributor.”

He added that Spotify’s copyright team said this issue was increasingly common.

The re-uploaded music remains available on other platforms but the band are hopeful it will “all be back to normal soon”.

Watford Observer: @capacitor_photography@capacitor_photography (Image: @capacitor_photography)

Assimilate added that they are still writing new material and planning more shows.

Matt said: “We are feeling positive for what 2023 brings out way.”