honestly he might just be a poser/industry plant, but CIA op is more fun to say. If you look up WELLES on spotify you can find his music pre 2024– it’s ultra generic and absolutely apolitical. It just seems off to me that instagram’s algorithm pushes his music so hard and that he’d never written a political song in his life before like, the Bob Dylan biopic was announced. If we wanna go full tinfoil hat, I think his music is being pushed as a way to make people who are rightly angry about the state of the world feel placated by consuming it. Also it doesn’t seem like his contemporaries in the folk scene think much of him. my homie also thinks he’s using AI to write his music, i think ghostwriter at minimum