If Geese is a Psyop Plug me Back into the Matrix
Wired ran a piece last week hinting that Geese — the four kids from Brooklyn who sound like Radiohead and Led Zeppelin had a baby in a Bushwick practice space — might be an industry plant. A marketing operation in a vintage denim jacket. A chaotic-good psyop in bootcut jeans.
I read the article. I weighed the claims. I thought hard about what it would mean if it were true.
And my considered response, as an American, a music fan, and a person who has watched the culture eat itself for twenty years, is:
Please. Let it be true.
Plug me back into the Matrix. Run the cables through my spine. Feed the propaganda in through the auditory cortex. If the deep state’s current agenda is to manufacture a rock band that makes grown men cry during the bridge of a song about cowboys, I am on board. I am a volunteer. I will hold the ladder.
The Accusation
The “industry plant” genre of music writing works like this: a young band gets too good, too fast, too polished. A famous producer takes their calls. A glossy magazine runs a profile before the blogs do. Ergo, the reasoning goes, they are only half real. But that’s only half true. And that’s how a lot of assholes feel, but that’s not how I feel at all.
Geese has tripped every alarm. They met as teenagers at Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn. They recorded their first record, Projector, in a basement and got signed to Partisan Records before most of them could legally order a beer in Williamsburg. Their second album, 3D Country (2023), arrived fully formed — slide guitar, cosmic-western swagger, frontman Cameron Winter singing like he’d just been exhumed from a 1972 Laurel Canyon demo tape. Their third, Getting Killed (2025), pulled the same trick twice in a row, which is the hardest thing in rock. Cameron’s solo record Heavy Metal got itself anointed by every rockist critic still alive.
This, the theory goes, is suspicious. A twenty-something cannot simply be this good. Somebody must be bankrolling the authenticity.
Fine. You got me. It was the CIA.
Have You Heard The Music
Before we continue, exhibit A.
That’s them on Nigel Godrich’s From The Basement. Live. No overdubs. No pitch correction. No safety net.
Listen to that chorus. Listen to the way Cameron Winter bends a vowel like he’s trying to pour it into a jar. That is not the sound of a Spotify A&R playlist. That is the sound of a man who has listened to Physical Graffiti approximately one thousand times and emerged on the other side with a PhD in swagger.
And the guitar tones. My God, the guitar tones. In an era when every hit song sounds like it was rendered in Logic Pro by a fourteen-year-old in Stockholm on a cracked laptop, here is a band that has rediscovered the radical concept of amplifiers. Of rooms. Of letting a snare sound like a snare and not a sample of a snare run through seven plugins named after extinct animals.
If the industry made this, the industry owes us an apology. And then another album.
If This Is Propaganda Print More
The whole industry-plant discourse assumes there is some purer alternative. Some utopia where bands emerge fully organic, fertilized only by the love of craft and the sweat of DIY venues, untainted by capital. This is a fantasy on the scale of the flat earth.
Led Zeppelin had Peter Grant breaking knees on their behalf. The Beatles had Brian Epstein in a suit. Bob Dylan was marketed by Columbia Records with the ferocity of a detergent launch. Elvis was literally a product test conducted by a man named Colonel Parker who was not a colonel. The question was never whether a band was a product.
The question is whether the product is any good.
And the product, in this case, rips.
If it turns out a shadowy cabal of label executives sat in a Manhattan boardroom in 2019 and said “what this country needs is four Brooklyn kids — Cameron Winter, Emily Green, Dom DiGesu, and Max Bassin — who can make guitar music sound dangerous again” — good. Promote those executives. Give them a bonus. Give them a Nobel Prize. If you want me to pay my taxes, you’re gonna have to fund the music industry.
Here is what your cultural tax dollars should be subsidizing:
Tell me that’s fake. Tell me that was assembled in a conference room by a consultant named Braden. I dare you. I’ll save you the trouble: it wasn’t, and honestly, even if it was, I no longer care.
We have lived through the industry manufacturing Nickelback. Manufacturing whichever Disney Channel alum is currently being laundered through a breakup album. Manufacturing whatever TikTok last decided to metabolize into a fifteen-second hook. If the industry has pivoted, at long last, to manufacturing good, then I will not be the one standing in the way of progress.
A Partial History of Useful Psyops
The CIA, we now know, secretly funded abstract expressionism during the Cold War because they wanted the Soviets to see that American art was free and weird. We got Jackson Pollock out of that. Not bad.
They bankrolled the Paris Review. We got decades of good short fiction. Acceptable.
They ran MKUltra. That one, admittedly, went poorly.
But the point stands: some psyops produce Rothkos and some produce brainwashed assassins, and you take the bitter with the sweet. If the 2020s psyop is “make twenty-two-year-olds from Brooklyn sound like they’ve been touring since the Carter administration,” sign me up for the newsletter. I want the merch. I want the tote bag. I want a bumper sticker that says I ♥ My Industry Plant.
The Only Thing Worse Than A Plant Is A Field
The critics want us to worry about authenticity. The critics can go home. Authenticity was a luxury of an era that had the surplus to be picky. We do not live in that era. We live in an era where the number one song of the week is, statistically, some algorithmically-optimized jingle designed to loop under a nineteen-second vertical video of a woman mispronouncing charcuterie.
If, against that backdrop, four kids from Brooklyn are making records that sound like they were unearthed from a 1973 Island Records vault — I do not care who planted them. Plant more. Plant a field. Plant a forest. Convert a Kansas cornfield into a Geese farm. Genetically modify them for radio play. Give them federal subsidies.
The matrix is already installed. The only question is what they’re piping in. If it’s this — a band that sings in a voice like gravel dipped in honey, about getting killed, about cowboys, about everything — then yes. Plug me in. Turn the dial up. Lock the door behind me.
Wait till they hear about Taylor Swift.