Forget Bad Bunny’s halftime show and the Drake lawsuit: if social media is any indication, this year’s biggest music controversy concerns Brooklyn rock band Geese.

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

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

Most recently, a Wired article with the clickbait title “The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop” pointed to the band’s use of a media strategy firm to build online hype, feeding into the view that the entire phenomenon was fake.

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’t vibe with the group, many people have tried to suggest there’s something nefarious about a quartet of privileged rich kids who flirt with reactionary rock masculinity and run schemes to rise to the top.

Of course, it’s perfectly okay to dislike Geese, and it’s great to be critical of the music industry’s worst practices. But the episode reflects the flawed nature of contemporary cultural discourse — particularly the tendency to dress up vibes-based personal judgments as high-stakes political litmus tests.

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

Rock’s Saviors

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.

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 the up-and-comers “indie-rock prodigies” — but they remained largely in the wheelhouse of hipsters and insiders.

The band’s fortunes began to shift at the end of 2024, when singer and guitarist Cameron Winter released his solo album Heavy Metal. And they launched into overdrive the following year when the band released their fourth album, Getting Killed — provoking a critical firestorm and transforming them into the most talked about band of the year. Many rave reviews ran with headlines like “Finally, a New Idea in Rock and Roll” and “How Geese Took Flight to Become ‘Gen Z’s First Great American Band.”

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.

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

Geese clearly appeals to a crowd who wants music to matter again. Winter’s Carnegie Hall performance last December capped off the band’s big year, inspiring the kind of scene-report-style commentary that was once the hallmark of rock reporting. Commentators couldn’t help but remark on all the luminaries in the crowd, like REM’s Michael Stipe and Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, and the fact that directors Paul Thomas Anderson and Benny Safdie were both there filming earned headlines in its own right.

The band’s irreverent media presence also evokes rock’s glory days, particularly Winter’s coy evasiveness during interviews. That spirit was perfectly captured by drummer Max Bassin, who exemplified an old-school punk ethos with a curt BRIT Award acceptance speech: “I just want to say, free Palestine, fuck ICE, RIP Mani, let’s go Geese.”

For many, the band’s success made it clear: rock was so back.

Noise Pollution

The problem with becoming rock’s great hope in 2026 is that not everyone thinks it deserves one.

Geese began to attract heat as soon as they started to blow up. Plenty of people simply took issue with the band’s sound, which they found cacophonous or confusing. Others zeroed in on Winter’s eccentric singing.

Many also didn’t love the euphoric headlines and savior rhetoric, either because they felt rock didn’t need saving or Geese wasn’t the band to do it.

Even so, several comments implied there was something not just wrong but troubling about cheering on Geese.

More than one commentator evoked the supposed white masculinity of the band (confusing, since one member of the band isn’t white, and another is a woman). The theme was expressed in a friendlier way by linking the band to the resurgence of “white boy garage music,” while less playful commentary has focused on the band’s “performative masculinity” and the “near-manosphere politics” of their fans.

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

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 “relatively affluent art school kid” is hardly rare when it comes to rock pedigree. David Crosby’s 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’s father was a diplomat. Radiohead itself formed at the elite Abingdon School in Oxfordshire.

But recent discourse has dragged out a more vulgar kind of sociologism endemic to our era. As one Substacker wrote, the band’s popularity reflects the “domination of the privately educated” over music. Additionally, Geese “come 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.”

Geese, as it turns out, isn’t just bad — they’re Trumpy. Somehow.

A Musical Psyop

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.

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 stellar Brooklyn musician in her own right — wrote a Substack post that threw more fuel on the fire.

McLamb called attention to Chaotic Good Studios, a brand strategy firm that helped create “narrative campaigns” for companies and artists. She detailed her shock at discovering that the company had not only boosted Winter’s song-of-the-year contender “Love Takes Miles” as well as Geese’s record Getting Killed but had been working with other artists she admired like Wet Leg, Jane Remover, and Dijon.

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

The situation looked even shadier when a day after McLamb’s essay went online, Chaotic Good pulled the names of Geese and several other clients from their site.

But McLamb wasn’t 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.

In mid-April, Wired reshared McLamb’s scoop with a sensationalist headline calling the band “a psyop.” While the article added all kinds of caveats, “maybes” and “perhapses,” the headline does all the work the internet needs.

The Wired essay has already attracted a series of measured responses, including an A.V. Club piece that proclaimed, “Congratulations, You Discovered Digital Marketing.”

But it’s too late. The discourse cycle has begun once again, with yet another weapon for online denizens who are eager to prove the band was as unlikable as they already wanted them to be.