Geese Address The Psyop Allegations

After experiencing one of the most significant rock-band breakouts in recent memory over the past couple years, Geese are the subject of a new Rolling Stone cover story by esteemed journalist and friend of the site Simon Vozick-Levinson. You should read it, but I'm going to pass along a couple choice tidbits regarding the psyop allegations.

One late-breaking storyline within Geese's ascension involves the participation of a marketing agency called Chaotic Good, whose employees bragged to Billboard about helping artists blow up by manufacturing buzz around them via fake social media accounts, a process they described as "trend simulation." This led Wired to publish a feature on promotional astroturfing headlined "The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop." In the new story, Geese frontman Cameron Winter remarks on the sudden hubbub surrounding them last year. He seems perplexed about why his band got so much bigger than their peers so fast:

It was very scary when it was starting. It didn’t feel like a good thing exactly. We didn’t really know why. I think we still don’t know why. It just feels like a weird time and place for this record to land well on a bigger scale, to be the thing that makes everyone want to buy a ticket to the show.… I don’t know. It was probably robots or something.

Winter later comes out and says he thought it made a lot of sense that "trend simulation" might have sparked Geese-mania, while disavowing any personal involvement with it:

I thought the same thing, I really did. That seemed like a reasonable explanation... We were just like, "Oh, my God. The whole fucking thing is fake." We were having a meltdown. Then we marched up to our label over email, the relevant team members, like, "How long have all our fuckin’ fans been fake, you sons of bitches?"

However, once he sought clarification from the band's team, he was told that Chaotic Good's services on Geese's behalf had not included trend simulation:

It wasn’t comments or fake fans or bots or anything. It was low-effort TikTok posts that were used to boost the algorithm. They showed us samples, and it made me feel better because they were so shitty.

He says the saga taught the band "that we should show up to Zoom meetings about how our record’s going to be advertised." As for what he and Olivia Rodrigo talked about when they got dinner together in LA this year? "Oh, we just talked about the Founding Fathers. It’s a rich topic."

There's a lot of great storytelling in the piece, and Vozick-Levinson did a great job getting the various band members to open up. It's a must-read if you want to get a better sense of Geese as people, their experience in the eye of the hype storm, and more. Dig into the full piece here. Oh, and this video in which Winter discusses his unreleased solo material is too funny not to share.