The internet’s favorite psyop, Geese, mesmerizes Outside Lands

When Geese frontman Cameron Winter took the microphone at Outside Lands, his permanent frog-in-throat voice bellowed out the lyrics “I’ll repeat what I say, but I’ll never explain” from the song “Husbands.” It kicked off one of the most hyped sets of the festival, with thousands of fans hanging on his every word — and relishing a silly San Francisco reference in midset. But as the meandering bluesy guitar riffs rang out through the meadow, it was the slogan on his T-shirt that in some ways spoke loudest to the shadow that’s followed the band this year: “Nothing feels real.”  

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In the world of indie rock music, 2025 belonged to Geese. Now in their 10th year as a band, the quartet of Brooklyn don’t-call-them-hipsters took the music world by storm with their fourth studio album “Getting Killed.” It clocked in at No. 7 on Pitchfork’s top albums of the year (breakout star Winter’s solo outing “Heavy Metal” scored the No. 3 ranking). The band’s album, inexplicably produced by trap producer Kenny Beats (Kenneth Blume), is a tour de force of creative rock excursions, sounding at times like Led Zeppelin on ayahuasca, in other moments like a post-stomp-clap-hey act. It was my favorite album of the year.

Or was it? In late March, Substack writer and touring musician Eliza McLamb published a story titled “Fake Fans,” musing on Geese’s partnership with Chaotic Good Projects as revealed in a recent Billboard interview. The marketing group creates social media accounts to seed platforms like TikTok with music and videos about the band, in a strategy that it dubs “trend simulation.” Other clients include big-name pop stars like Justin Bieber, but also bubbling-up acts like Zara Larsson, Mk.gee and fellow Outside Lands act Dijon. Chaotic Good quietly removed its client list from its website after the story was published.

Then in April, just a few days after the band’s triumphant Coachella performance, Wired published a now-infamous feature titled “The Fanfare Around The Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop,” positioning the marketing efforts as nefarious (McLamb has said she does not agree with the psyop label). The Guardian followed, going deeper into the trend and naming another company, Your Culture, employed by the likes of Chappell Roan and the Last Dinner Party.

On Friday night, I was surrounded by thousands of other fans who drank the Geese-ade. The band stepped onstage after a short intro video of New York City-themed B-roll heavy on Knicks highlights as Keith Mansfield’s triumphant “Funky Fanfare” played in the background. Their hometown clearly reciprocates the attachment, with Winter landing on a cover of New York Magazine and receiving a glowing New York Times profile.

Part of Geese’s power comes from contrast, dynamics that shift from Max Bassin’s propulsive drumming on the song “Getting Killed” or a full-scale noise freak-out from guitarist Emily Green to soft, somber moments where Winter casually strums soft chords, clinging by a thread to a swung beat composed of melodic tom rolls.

After a couple bangers from the album “Getting Killed,” they shifted to a run of five songs from “3D Country,” starting with “Crusades” and “Gravity Blues.” Then, during “2122,” Winter pulled out a slick piece of stagecraft, whipping out his phone and holding it up to the pickups of his guitar, amplifying a YouTube video that he dedicated to San Francisco: the Glee cast recording of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” (Mayor Daniel Lurie was spotted watching from the crowd, likely nodding in appreciation).

Next, the anthemic “I See Myself” resulted in the biggest sing-along of the set. Winter’s genuine crooning pulled back the curtain on the slacker sneers that’ve given Geese such an effortless air of cool, backed up by some of the tightest instrumentation in music today (see the bombastic drum solo of “Cowboy Nudes”).

After the “3D Country” miniset, the band returned to “Getting Killed” territory with “a song about horses” (“100 Horses”) that inspired the set’s biggest mosh pit, and the delicate “Au Pays du Cocaine,” which sounded particularly heartfelt in a live context, as did “Taxes.” They closed with the explosive “Trinidad,” erupting into a wall of distortion as Winter sang a dire warning about a bomb in his car.

Geese’s sudden ubiquity may have been due to guerilla marketing, but for better or probably worse, that’s the world we’re living in — bands rise and fall not only on the strength of their music, but by their team’s ability to rise to the top of the algorithm. If a perfect album drops on Bandcamp and no one’s around to hear it, did it make a sound?

Geese might’ve landed on magazine covers and Top 10 lists because of subversive “trend simulation” or because they put out one of the best records of the year after a decade of paying their dues. At Outside Lands they proved that although nothing may seem real these days, their music is as authentic as it gets.