Geese Finally Respond to Psyop Allegations

Geese, the indie rock sensations whose breakout last year benefitted from an alleged astroturfing campaign, have addressed the fallout from their association with the publicity firm Chaotic Good.They do not seem terribly upset about the narrative that fake fans fueled the band’s stratospheric rise behind Getting Killed.

“I thought the same thing, I really did,” Cameron Winter said, laughing, in a new cover story with Rolling Stone.“That seemed like a reasonable explanation.” He continued, “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?’”The fake-fans debate had begun swirling back in April, when singer-songwriter Eliza McLamb posted a Substack, Fake Fans, cross-analyzing a Billboard interview with Chaotic Good’s founders.

Two weeks later, Wired published a report headlined “The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop.” The attendant discourse risked flattening some context of the Geese explosion: Winter had released the cult-making solo debut, Heavy Metal, in late 2024 (and is working on a follow-up, per RS); Getting Killed had already been festooned with critical plaudits upon its release last September; and the clips promoted by astroturfing accounts depicted shows attended, naturally, by thousands of real fans.In the band’s first interview since the hoo-ha, a typically acerbic Winter appeared happy to broach the matter, telling interviewer Simon Vozick-Levinson that he, too, struggled to get his head around the success of Getting Killed.“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.”Amid the astroturfing discourse, the band sought answers from its team.Chaoti...