Forget about Bad Bunny’s halftime show or Drake’s lawsuit. If social media is any indication, the biggest music controversy of the year involves Brooklyn rock band The Geese.
Geese attracted a lot of attention last year with their latest album. be killed has received high praise from paste and consequences of sound Before reaching number 1 on the year-end best album list, stereo gum and new york times. The uproar was reminiscent of the days when bands earned coveted 9.0 ratings on TV shows. pitchfork It felt like a music event.
Still, enthusiasm has been tempered by fierce backlash, with online commentators now belittling Geese as an industrial plant, a retread, and a hack. The excitement was so high that popular music YouTuber Anthony Fantano called on haters to calm down.
Most recently, wired An article with the clickbait title “Fanfare for the Band: Geese Was Actually a Psycho” pointed out that the band was using a media strategy firm to build online hype, furthering the view that the entire phenomenon was fake.
Unlike in the past, when dissing a band was just a way to stand out from the music crowd, modern discourse has raised the bar. Many have tried to suggest that not only don’t the group have the right vibe, but that there’s something sinister about this quartet of privileged rich kids who placate reactionary rock masculinity and carry out plans to rise to the top.
Of course, it’s perfectly fine to hate Geese, and it’s great to criticize the worst practices in the music industry. But this episode reflects the flawed nature of contemporary cultural discourse, particularly the tendency to disguise personal judgments based on mood as high-stakes political litmus tests.
The lesson is simple, given how often the stories throw cold water on rock bands that have managed to get people excited about the future of music again. This means that sometimes it’s enough just to know whether you like music or not.
Geese was formed in 2016 when the members were still teenagers. They planned to disband after graduation, but as their interest in their music began to grow, they postponed attending university.
After signing a joint deal with PIAS and Partisan Records, the band released two records and began gaining positive press. In 2021, Rolling Stone called the up-and-comers “indie-rock prodigies,” but they’ve largely remained in the wheelhouse of hipsters and insiders.
The band’s fortunes began to change at the end of 2024, when singer and guitarist Cameron Winter released a solo album. heavy metal. And the following year, when the band released their fourth album, they went into overdrive. be killed — sparked a serious firestorm and transformed them into the year’s hottest band. Numerous rave reviews were published with headlines such as “Finally, a new idea for rock ‘n’ roll” and “How the Geese rose to become ‘Gen Z’s first great American band.”
Geese strongly appealed to nostalgia for an era when rock had a strong presence in the musical zeitgeist. However strange the band may be, their sound is clearly reminiscent of the past, capturing the frenetic echoes of the Stones, the raw power of early 1970s garage rock, and the carefully uncurated cool of 2000s indie trends.
Geese’s retro appeal makes sense given that listeners are increasingly looking to the past. There’s a growing consensus that the 2020s were the worst musical decade in nearly a century. Over the past few years, Luminate’s year-end music report has documented a decline in interest in contemporary music. In fact, Spotify’s trendy rap feature, Listening Age, was inspired by the fact that Gen Z and Alpha listeners are more likely to listen to music from older generations than other generations.
Geese clearly appeals to a crowd that wants music to matter again. Winter’s Carnegie Hall performance last December capped off a momentous year for the band, evoking the on-the-ground report-style commentary that was once a hallmark of rock coverage. Commentators couldn’t help but mention all the celebrities who were in the audience, including REM’s Michael Stipe and Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, and the fact that directors Paul Thomas Anderson and Benny Safdie were both in attendance for the shoot made headlines in and of itself.
The band’s irreverent media presence also harks back to rock’s glory days, especially Winter’s evasiveness during interviews. That spirit was perfectly captured by drummer Max Bassin, who epitomized the good old punk spirit with his brash Brit Awards acceptance speech: “I just want to say: Liberate Palestine, fuck ICE, rest in peace, go, Geese.”
For many, the band’s success made it clear that rock was back for good.
The problem with being rock’s big hope in 2026 is that not everyone thinks it deserves it.
As soon as the goose started blowing, it began to gather heat. Many simply took issue with the band’s sound as dissonant or confusing. Some people took notice of Winter’s unusual singing style.
Many also didn’t like the euphoric headlines and savior-like rhetoric, either because they felt rock didn’t need saving or that Geese weren’t the band to do it.
Still, some comments hinted that rooting for Geese was not only problematic, but problematic.
Multiple commentators called out the band’s white masculinity (confusing since one of the band’s members is not white and the other is female). This theme is expressed in a friendlier way by linking the band to the resurgence of “white boy garage music,” while less playful commentary focuses on the band’s “performative masculinity” and fans’ “near-manosphere politics.”
The band’s class background has also made it a target for opponents. Members of the Geese attended Brooklyn Friends School and Little Red School House, and two of their families have roots in the industry. Bassin’s father is a marketing executive for the Alternative Distribution Alliance, and guitarist Emily Greene’s father is a sound designer who worked with John Cale.
Hypocrisy about authenticity and background is as old as rock itself. Millennial readers will no doubt remember a similar debate over the Strokes a quarter-century ago. However, in reality, when it comes to rock families, “relatively wealthy art college students” are not at all uncommon. David Crosby’s father worked on Wall Street before becoming an Oscar-winning cinematographer. Gram Parsons was a prep school student and the grandson of a fruit king. Joe Strummer’s father was a diplomat. Radiohead itself was formed at Abingdon School, an elite school in Oxfordshire.
However, recent discourse has brought out a more vulgar kind of sociology typical of our time. As one substacker wrote, the band’s popularity reflects the “dominance of the privately educated” over music. Furthermore, Gies “comes from a boring, moneyed background, and for their type of white male rock star to succeed in this way is actually the perfect symbol of this era of Trump and conservative success.”
As it turns out, geese aren’t just bad, they’re Trumpy. Somehow.
But Geese’s detractors finally came under fire this month when it was revealed that the band had used an online strategy firm to gain attention and increase engagement.
Their success, which seemed like an overnight success to those not paying attention, had already led to accusations that they were industrial plants. But in late March, Eliza McCrum, an accomplished Brooklyn musician, wrote a Substack post that added fuel to the fire.
McCrum highlighted Chaotic Good Studio, a brand strategy firm that helps companies and artists create “narrative campaigns.” She detailed her shock when she learned that the company not only backed Winter’s Song of the Year nominee “Love Takes Miles” and Geese’s record. be killed However, she worked with other artists she admired, including Wet Legs, Jane Remover, and Dijon.
Far from being a hit piece, McCrum’s essay was actually just a great piece of industry analysis, describing Chaotic Good’s obnoxious hype machine with relentless posting about its customers from its burner accounts. In the founder’s words, once a team of artists has acquired a coveted piece, saturday night live “If the second SNL starts at midnight, you should post 100 times about how that was the best performance of the year.”
The situation became even more suspicious when Chaotic Good removed the names of Gies and several other customers from its site the day after McCrum’s essay was posted online.
However, Mr. McCrum was not writing an article disassembling Giese. After all, the industry has a much longer, sordid history that predates this practice, and she even admitted that such a service might advance her own career.
Mid-April, wired McCrum’s scoop was reshared with a sensational headline calling the band “spiritualists.” The article had all sorts of “maybe” and “perhaps” warnings added to it, but the headline does everything the internet needs.
of wired This essay has already attracted a series of measured reactions. AV club Articles proclaiming, “Congratulations, you’ve discovered digital marketing.”
But it’s already too late. The cycle of speech begins again, with yet another weapon for online denizens eager to prove that the band isn’t as popular as they’d hoped.
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