Golden Geese

So I've been good and have been biting my tongue, not joining in the feeding frenzy over the band Geese for a whole week. 

Actually, for a while longer than that. But I can't resist anymore. 

I'm reasonably plugged in to new music (as you might have figured out by the fact that this is not my first rant about such things) and it was hard to miss Geese so yeah, I've been listening to them and trying them out for quite a while. It took a while but they grew on me (it was not love at first sight, it was also not eww-skip). You can detect some DNA from The Strokes, White Stripes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and so on. There's a bit of a Black Country New Road vibe, which I loved when Isaac Wood was still the lead singer, bless his heart. But it's pretty original, and it is most definitely real music, not AI-generated or assembly-line-produced drivel, which is becoming something in itself.

But I also have this kind-of snobby affectation that I like to know about bands before everyone else does so when something is super-hyped it kind of turns me off. And in the last six months and maybe longer, they've been super-hyped. They have been on Jimmy Kimmel and SNL and Coachella, their album Getting Killed was rated #5 in 2025 by Rolling Stone and got one of those coveted 9.0 ratings on Pitchfork, and they've been hailed as "the saviors of rock 'n' roll," "Gen Z's first great rock band," "this generation's Nirvana" and so on. So of course I took note, but with all the noise, it had become impossible to figure out whether you liked them for yourself or because they were rated highly by who knows who. I like it much better when something pops up on my release radar or because they're playing The Independent or another small venue and then either a track catches my attention and I flag it or a week later it's gone forever.

A lot of people have been trying to shit all over Geese for a while. That rock 'n' roll doesn't need or want or deserve saving. That they are too Brooklyn, too white, too pro-Palestine, somehow Trump-tainted, not engaged enough, too engaged, too male, too token, too privileged, too popular, too Pitchfork, too nepo, too art-school, too derivative, try-too-hard, too forced eccentric, not emotionally authentic, too messy, too indulgent, overproduced, underproduced, too raw, too clean, too weird, too calculated, not catchy enough, too revivalist, and so on. None of it stuck. They were on a stratospheric ramp. Icarus?

So maybe, at least initially, there was a bit of schadenfreude when WIRED threw a stink bomb at them this week (and, by association, at all the implied suckers who had fallen for them), calling their success the result of a psyop because they had used digital marketing firm Chaotic Good Projects to try to go viral, the headline implying that these seemingly authentic musicians who have been doing this since they were in high school a few years ago were in fact industry plants. Like a Brooklyn version of K-pop. Never mind that WIRED's own headline was engaging in a much more basic psyop, click-baiting, a tried-and-true strategy. And never mind that they essentially took all the information for the article out of a much more fair substack article by Eliza McLamb, who primarily tried to point out that it's hard for bands to get discovered organically. And never mind that gaming "the algorithm," like Chaotic Good Projects claims to try to do, doesn't work because, well, game theory says there is too much money involved for the algorithm to be easily gamed. So if Geese deserves shit for anything, it's not so much for trying to market themselves but for doing it in a way that can be made to look shady even by WIRED (a magazine targeted at lecturing boomers about what they should find cool and what they should be afraid of in tech). Even if it's completely common practice while being pretty ineffective.

The backlash against WIRED and its dirty work was quick and vehement. But the damage was done. Geese has turned into Neil Diamond: You must either love or loathe; you can't not have an opinion about them anymore. And like with their fellow New Yorker Timothée Chalamet, the narrative had changed, and even the love has become apologetic. While they didn't get cancelled outright, they definitely have an asterisk.

It was pretty funny when this morning, Alex Pappademas of GQ (incidentally also owned by Condé Nast) gave us permission to still like Geese, in his glowing review of their Coachella set in which he reviewed all the drama and exposed the WIRED article for the hit-piece clickbait that it was. It actually made me like GQ a little more, and made me want to read more of Alex' stuff. Although cynical me wonders whether someone at Condé Nast was perhaps a bit embarrassed or blindsided by WIRED and this was a peace offering. 

And Geese, to their credit, ignored all the crap. They just played.

Weirdly, I like them more now. Not because I feel sorry for them (they couldn't care less about my pity). Maybe because I can finally trust myself a little more to actually form an opinion about the music, rather than just trying to decide whether it's OK to ride the hype wave or be my usual ornery contrarian and go against it?