A rising Gen Z indie musician known as Betty Hammerschlag has turned out to be a middle-aged man, in an elaborate — and dare we say a bit creepy — deception that fooled everyone from fans to music critics to the artist’s own collaborators.
Music journalist Shawn Reynaldo blew open the charade in an exposé published Wednesday in his newsletter First Floor. By all appearances, Hammerschlag presented herself as a young woman still in art school, using pictures of women in her social media posts and promotional materials, and writing in a pointedly whimsical, all-lowercase and flowery emoji-laden style intended to evoke Gen Z.
Hammerschlag’s music has been featured and praised in notable publications like The Guardian and The Quietus as recently as last week, and has received quite a bit of airtime on the renowned British music streamer NTS Radio. That includes songs from her latest album which, we kid you not, is titled “fake girl.”
But Reynaldo dug around and discovered that Hammerschlag didn’t actually exist, and was in reality the creation of Tilman Hornig, a 45-year-old (or possibly older) musician from Germany.
Hornig’s stunt extended beyond creating Hammerschlag’s artistic persona. According to Reynaldo, he went to extraordinary lengths to keep up the charade, such as messaging people online while still masquerading as a young girl, including other young female and queer artists.
Even some of the musicians Hornig/Hammerschlag collaborated with were under the impression that they were working with a young woman, including tibslc, an ambient artist from Leipzig. They had several private exchanges; in one of them Hammerschlag told her she couldn’t perform at a show tibslc was organizing because “I have to study for several exams and hardly have the energy for music and live shows ❤️.”
“When I eventually learned about the fact that Tilman Hornig, a 47(?) year old guy, was running it the whole time, it was really quite a shock, like one of those moments when your reality is shaking to the core because someone tricked you,” tibslc told First Floor. “I was emotionally unwell and affected by it a lot. I felt like I was played, especially because of the private chat.”
Tim Dalzell, the founder of the label blush which published some of Hammschlag’s music, also felt betrayed, saying in a recent Instagram story that he had “no idea who was behind the project when I released it.”
“The whole time we worked together he messaged me in the style and dialect of a young girl, creating elaborate lies to cover his tracks,” Dalzell said. “At one point he asked for royalties to be paid earlier so he could buy paints for art school.”
“I was under the impression the artist wanted privacy and respected that,” he added. “When I found out the deal (earlier this year) — I expressed my concerns to him about how he was running the project. I didn’t like how he responded and so I decided to stop selling the music.”
Suspiciously, Hammerschlag would evade requests for a live interview, insisting they be conducted over email. On several occasions when Hammerschlag was booked for live shows, a young woman would appear claiming to be her, but organizers strongly suspected she was an impersonator. In other words, it appeared that Hornig was sending women to pretend to be Hammerschlag.
It also appears that Hornig used AI to keep up the act. Reynalldo found that some of the promotional text for one of Hammschlag’s albums were flagged as AI by several AI detectors. It’s unclear, though, if the female sounding vocals in some of Hammerschlag’s songs are the work of AI as well.
In his exposé, Reynaldo didn’t leave us wondering what his personal thoughts on Hornig’s behavior was.
“It’s creepy, especially when so many of the people that Hornig is interacting with — including people that he has directly sought out online — are unwitting participants in an art project they didn’t ask to join,” he wrote.
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