Brooklyn indie rockers Geese shot to the heights of rock and roll fame at the end of 2025. Their fourth album Getting Killed, was released in late September and dominated the year’s top 10 lists. Their fall tour sold out almost everywhere. The collective buzz earned them slots on Saturday Night Live and at Coachella and made the band (and frontman Cameron Winter, who has his own solo career) something close to a household name—at least in households where polyrhythmic art rock is a topic of conversation. The Guardian’s review of the new record called Geese “the new saviors of rock ’n’ roll.” Their explosion onto the scene, seemingly out of nowhere, led to an inevitable backlash. Haters called them a “psyop.” Some questioned their sudden-seeming rise to superstardom, calling them “an industry plant.” Others, while acknowledging their talent, attributed their fame to savvy marketing. Certainly, when a band blows up so quickly, it can seem inorganic, and a bit weird. When a band moves from the edges of the conversation to smack in the center, it can raise suspicions that its darling status was attributable to some sort of back-room machinations rather than a rare combination of talent, hard work, and a bit of good luck. Now, those paranoid-seeming suspicions have been proven true—sort of. The cofounder of a digital marketing company called Chaotic Good Projects, whose viral marketing methods involve creating networks of social media pages and using them to drive music into recommendation algorithms, has confirmed to WIRED that his company engineered marketing campaigns for both Geese and Cameron Winter