{"id":397965,"date":"2026-04-18T01:55:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T01:55:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/397965\/"},"modified":"2026-04-18T01:55:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T01:55:07","slug":"its-okay-to-like-geese","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/397965\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Okay to Like Geese"},"content":{"rendered":"

Forget Bad Bunny\u2019s halftime show<\/a> and the Drake lawsuit<\/a>: if social media is any indication, this year\u2019s biggest music controversy concerns Brooklyn rock band Geese.<\/p>\n

Geese blew up last year, with their latest album Getting Killed<\/a> earning rave reviews from Paste<\/a> and Consequence of Sound<\/a> before topping year-end best album lists by Stereogum<\/a> and the New York Times<\/a>. The furor recalled the days when bands getting a coveted 9.0 rating<\/a> on Pitchfork<\/a> felt like a musical event.<\/p>\n

Even so, enthusiasm has been tempered by an intense backlash, with online commentators now dismissing Geese as industry plants<\/a>, retreads<\/a>, and hacks<\/a>. The frenzy became so elevated that popular music YouTuber Anthony Fantano<\/a> issued a call for the haters to chill out<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Most recently, a Wired article<\/a> with the clickbait title \u201cThe Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop\u201d pointed to the band\u2019s use of a media strategy firm to build online hype, feeding into the view that the entire phenomenon was fake.<\/p>\n

Unlike the old days, when dissing bands was just a way of standing out from the musical in-crowd, contemporary discourse ups the ante. Rather than just say they don\u2019t vibe with the group, many people have tried to suggest there\u2019s something nefarious about a quartet of privileged rich kids who flirt with reactionary rock masculinity and run schemes to rise to the top.<\/p>\n

Of course, it\u2019s perfectly okay to dislike Geese, and it\u2019s great to be critical of the music industry\u2019s worst practices<\/a>. But the episode reflects the flawed nature of contemporary cultural discourse \u2014 particularly the tendency to dress up vibes-based personal judgments as high-stakes political litmus tests<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Given how much the conversation seems to be about pouring cold water on a rock band managing to get people excited about music\u2019s future once again, the lesson is simple: sometimes it\u2019s okay to just like or dislike music.<\/p>\n

Geese formed in 2016 while its members were still teenagers. While they had planned to dissolve after graduation, they postponed college as interest in their music began to grow.<\/p>\n

After signing a joint deal with PIAS and Partisan Records, the band released two records and started to win positive press. In 2021, Rolling Stone called<\/a> the up-and-comers \u201cindie-rock prodigies\u201d \u2014 but they remained largely in the wheelhouse of hipsters and insiders.<\/p>\n

The band\u2019s fortunes began to shift at the end of 2024, when singer and guitarist Cameron Winter released his solo album Heavy Metal<\/a>. And they launched into overdrive the following year when the band released their fourth album, Getting Killed \u2014 provoking a critical firestorm and transforming them into the most talked-about band of the year. Many rave reviews ran with headlines like<\/a> \u201cFinally, a New Idea in Rock and Roll\u201d and<\/a> \u201cHow Geese Took Flight to Become \u2018Gen Z\u2019s First Great American Band.\u201d<\/p>\n

The problem with becoming rock\u2019s great hope in 2026 is that not everyone thinks it deserves one.<\/p>\n

Geese strongly appealed to nostalgia for an era when rock felt like a stronger presence in the musical zeitgeist. However weird the band is, their sound explicitly hearkens back to the past, capturing the exuberant caterwauling of the Stones, the raw power of early 1970s garage rock, and the carefully uncurated cool of 2000s indie sleaze.<\/p>\n

Given that listeners are increasingly turning toward the past, Geese\u2019s retro appeal makes sense. There is a pervasive feeling that the 2020s have been one of the worst musical decades<\/a> in nearly a century. For several years, Luminate\u2019s Year End Music Report<\/a> has chronicled a declining interest in current music. In fact, Spotify\u2019s trendy Wrapped feature Listening Age was actually inspired<\/a> by how Gen Z and Alpha listeners are more likely to listen to music from older decades than other generations.<\/p>\n

Geese clearly appeals to a crowd who wants music to matter again. Winter\u2019s Carnegie Hall performance last December capped off the band\u2019s big year, inspiring the kind of scene-report-style commentary that was once the hallmark of rock reporting. Commentators couldn\u2019t help but remark on all the luminaries in the crowd, like REM\u2019s Michael Stipe and Sonic Youth\u2019s Lee Ranaldo, and the fact that directors Paul Thomas Anderson and Benny Safdie were both there filming earned headlines<\/a> in its own right.<\/p>\n

The band\u2019s irreverent media presence also evokes rock\u2019s glory days, particularly Winter\u2019s coy evasiveness during interviews<\/a>. That spirit was perfectly captured by drummer Max Bassin, who exemplified an old-school punk ethos with a curt BRIT Award acceptance speech<\/a>: \u201cI just want to say, free Palestine, fuck ICE, RIP Mani,\u00a0let\u2019s\u00a0go Geese.\u201d<\/p>\n

For many, the band\u2019s success made it clear: rock was so back.<\/p>\n

The problem with becoming rock\u2019s great hope in 2026 is that not everyone thinks it deserves one.<\/p>\n

Geese began to attract heat as soon as they started to blow up. Plenty of people simply took issue with the band\u2019s sound, which they found cacophonous or confusing. Others zeroed in on Winter\u2019s eccentric singing.<\/p>\n

Many also didn\u2019t love the euphoric headlines and savior rhetoric, either because they felt rock didn\u2019t need saving or Geese wasn\u2019t the band to do it.<\/p>\n

Even so, several comments implied there was something not just wrong but troubling about cheering on Geese.<\/p>\n

More than one commentator evoked the supposed white masculinity of the band (confusing, since one member of the band isn\u2019t white, and another is a woman). The theme was expressed in a friendlier way by linking the band to the resurgence<\/a> of \u201cwhite boy garage music,\u201d while less playful commentary has focused on the band\u2019s \u201cperformative masculinity<\/a>\u201d and the \u201cnear-manosphere politics<\/a>\u201d of their fans.<\/p>\n

The band\u2019s class background has also been a target for the haters. Geese\u2019s members attended Brooklyn Friends School and Little Red School House, and two of their families have industry roots: Bassin\u2019s father was a marketing executive for Alternative Distribution Alliance, and guitarist Emily Green\u2019s dad is a sound designer who worked with John Cale.<\/p>\n

Quibbling about authenticity and backgrounds is as old as rock itself. Millennial readers will no doubt remember similar debates around the Strokes as they were heating up a quarter-century ago. But the fact is that \u201crelatively affluent art school kid\u201d is hardly rare when it comes to rock pedigree. David Crosby\u2019s father worked on Wall Street before becoming an Oscar-winning cinematographer. Gram Parsons was a prep school kid and the grandson of a fruit magnate. Joe Strummer\u2019s father was a diplomat. Radiohead itself formed at the elite Abingdon School in Oxfordshire.<\/p>\n

But recent discourse has dragged out a more vulgar kind of sociologism endemic to our era. As one Substacker wrote, the band\u2019s popularity reflects<\/a> the \u201cdomination of the privately educated\u201d over music. Additionally, Geese \u201ccome from a boring, moneyed place and the success of their white male rock star type in this form is actually a perfect symbol for this age of Trump and Conservative success.\u201d<\/p>\n

Geese, as it turns out, isn\u2019t just bad \u2014 they\u2019re Trumpy. Somehow.<\/p>\n

But Geese detractors finally hit the motherlode this month when it came out that the band had used an online strategy firm in order to generate attention and boost engagement.<\/p>\n

Their success, which seemed to occur overnight to those not paying attention, had already provoked accusations that they were industry plants. But at the end of March, Eliza McLamb<\/a> \u2014 a stellar Brooklyn musician<\/a> in her own right \u2014 wrote a Substack post<\/a> that threw more fuel on the fire.<\/p>\n

McLamb called attention to Chaotic Good Studios, a brand strategy firm<\/a> that helped create \u201cnarrative campaigns\u201d for companies and artists. She detailed her shock at discovering that the company had not only boosted Winter\u2019s song-of-the-year contender \u201cLove Takes Miles\u201d as well as Geese\u2019s record Getting Killed but had been working with other artists she admired like Wet Leg, Jane Remover, and Dijon.<\/p>\n

Far from a hit piece, McLamb\u2019s essay was really just a great work of industry analysis, explaining Chaotic Good\u2019s off-putting hype machine, which involved posting relentlessly about clients from burner accounts. As the founders put it, after an artist\u2019s team lands the coveted Saturday Night Live performance, they really get to work: \u201cthe second SNL drops at midnight, you should post a hundred times saying that was the best performance of the year.\u201d<\/p>\n

The situation looked even shadier when a day after McLamb\u2019s essay went online, Chaotic Good pulled the names of Geese and several other clients from their site.<\/p>\n

But McLamb wasn\u2019t writing a Geese teardown. After all, the industry has a longer, dirtier history that predates this practice, and she even admitted a service like this might advance her own career.<\/p>\n

In mid-April, Wired reshared<\/a> McLamb\u2019s scoop with a sensationalist headline calling the band \u201ca psyop.\u201d While the article added all kinds of caveats, \u201cmaybes\u201d and \u201cperhapses,\u201d the headline does all the work the internet needs.<\/p>\n

The Wired essay has already attracted a series of measured responses, including an A.V. Club piece<\/a> that proclaimed, \u201cCongratulations, You Discovered Digital Marketing.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s too late. The discourse cycle has begun once again, with yet another weapon for online denizens<\/a> who are eager to prove the band was as unlikable as they already wanted them to be.<\/p>\n

Spirited debate about music is a great thing. It\u2019s especially interesting to see discussions about a band\u2019s influences and quality, as well as where the industry should be going.<\/p>\n

In an era where alternative music is surging back into public consciousness, it\u2019s a great time to reignite conversations about the role of rock music (and other genres) in the current musical landscape.<\/p>\n

We also should be critical of the models that dominate our industry and the broader place of music in culture, including the ills of streaming<\/a>, industry consolidation<\/a> AI-generated music<\/a>, and incursions on artistic speech<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The problem is that circular debates about influence and authenticity collide with attempts to moralize liking or not liking bands. These are attempts to reassert the pseudo-political<\/a> commentary that for far too long cast a shadow on music, film, and other art forms, particularly during the 2010s.<\/p>\n

We need something that moves beyond hype and hate: a perspective that takes for granted we can just dislike a band and move on if their vibe feels off, we don\u2019t like the singer\u2019s voice, or the wrong person told us they are going to save the world.<\/p>\n

Once we get there, we can have those more interesting conversations about what music is doing right now and what it ought to do instead. If Geese isn\u2019t quite a psyop or a savior, perhaps there\u2019s someone else out there who can show us a way forward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Forget Bad Bunny\u2019s halftime show and the Drake lawsuit: if social media is any indication, this year\u2019s biggest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":397966,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[146,85,46,409],"class_list":{"0":"post-397965","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-israel","11":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=397965"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397965\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/397966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=397965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=397965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=397965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}