Geese, the indie rock sensations whose breakout last year led to accusations of an astroturfing campaign, have addressed the fallout from their association with the digital marketing agency Chaotic Good. They do not seem terribly upset about the narrative that fake fans allegedly 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. Chaotic Good, they explained, had been hired to share Geese concert clips, but “it wasn’t comments or fake fans or bots or anything,” Winter said. “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.”
Bassist Dominic DiGesu added, “Come to the show, and fucking tell me how many bots you see.”
Winter appeared more concerned by the perception that Geese’s Saturday Night Live appearance was willfully antagonistic. “It really fucked me up just how hard people took it,” he said. “Of course, there were plenty of music-nerd people who loved it, but I felt like the reason they loved it was almost because it was sticking it to these average people who just turn on SNL after work. It depressed the shit out of me, because that’s not what I was trying to do. It’s not like I wanted to play a fucking song in a weird time signature that’s really loud and repetitive, and then just be like, ‘Ha, ha, you don’t get it like we do.’…. A lot of what we do gets seen as that. I don’t know how to fix that.”
One Geese narrative that needed no PR push has been dating rumors around Winter and Olivia Rodrigo since they were photographed together in April. Apparently uncomfortable with the topic, Winter waved away the interviewer’s offer to skip a question about what the pair had discussed. “Oh, we just talked about the Founding Fathers,” Winter said finally. “It’s a rich topic.”
