How Geese Became The Sound Of Gen Z

A new rock band hailing all the way from New York City has made waves as they took not only the genre, but the music industry as a whole by storm. 

Geese has found itself in the mouths and ears of every rock fan as they have become the predominant voice of the new generation. Critics rang in, hailing their lead singer, Cameron Winter, as a lyrical genius and a refreshing taste in the industry. Rock legends such as Patti Smith sang their praises in posts across various social media platforms. Fans bought concert tickets, t-shirts and albums both to profess their love for the band and to let the world know which side they stand on in the new rock reform.  

Like many of the new listeners of the mysterious rock band, upon first listen, my thought was, “What the hell is this?” The band sounds like a tape of a modern Pearl Jam demo, soaked in water and left to rot for six months in the bottom of a kindergartener’s backpack. The lead singer, for all his lyrical “genius”, is completely unintelligible and nonsensical. They are original because there is no logical reason as to why anyone would want to sound like them. 

So if this new band, the band that is supposedly saving rock music, is truly so off-putting and awful, then why is it rising to fame at all? The answer may come from a cross between a truly starved audience and the strange sex appeal of Cameron Winter. 

An Audience Starved

What kind of person goes to a Geese concert? One that is starved. Or stoned. For nearly a decade, rock fans have been starved of new content and forced to pick on the already heavily butchered carcass of the genre. In the dawn of rock, there was Elvis and Chuck Berry driving crowds wild with tawdry lyrics and wild dance moves. When the British invaded, Beatlemania took over, record shops flourished, and Mick Jagger took to the stage half-naked and painted with the devil. The 80s were a mess of too many hair metal bands singing love ballads in 10-inch heels and enough hairspray to open a hole in the ozone. The 90s came with a heavy backlash to the sexist, crude and hollow sound of the previous decade, with flannel and docs-clad artists full of angst and cynicism. By the early 2000s, garage rock revival dominated the early 2000s as The Strokes clashed with Arctic Monkeys for number one on the charts. The 2010s and 2020s, however? Only music festivals with a previously great rock band headlining and magazines reordering perfect lists of the greatest bands of all time. For nearly 50 years, each decade had far too many rock bands to easily list in an article whose sole purpose is to rank the greatest rock bands. Today, there are maybe three big rock groups breaking into mainstream media, and Greta Van Fleet hasn’t made a new album in over half a decade. 

In the past, there have been subgenres, countercultures and movements. Today, there is just a guy sort of making music, and fans are desperate to consume it with no opposition or competition to encourage them to do better. Like you, I can feel the thirst for something new to sink my teeth into burning in the back of my throat. I have longed to turn on the radio as I climb out of bed and start the day with reliably good rock music without having to turn on the oldies channel. It is a tiring task having to perfectly curate one’s own playlist to be listenable, and even then, the songs played are boring after enough listens (unless of course what you are listening to is Cream). When I first discovered Geese as they opened for Vampire Weekend in the summer of ‘25, I was desperate to love them. However, as the concert ended and I fell into the seat of my cab, barely containing my excitement to listen to the new-to-me band away from the thrills of live music, I found myself deeply disappointed. The music magazines, or what is left of them, are hesitant to even criticize these new bands like Geese, because if they fade into obscurity, there will be nothing left to say about the genre altogether. To oppose them feels almost brave, though in modern stan culture, any negative review of a popular artist will do that.  It does not truly matter how these artists sound or what they stand for, assuming they continue giving fans what they need, which at this point is just anything at all. This must come as a relief to bands like Geese, which have no right or merit to this newfound fame and could not survive a landscape where fans had other options. 

Living On The Existential Edge

Imagine it: Cameron Winter in all his ferociously fine form, the audience – enthusiastically ravenous as the shaggy, unkempt singer wages on. The audience is begging him to stay on stage, to call out to them, to help them express the voice of the current generation. 

Winter is the sound of Gen Z – so rawly and utterly alive and yet so imprisoned by our own conscientiousness. We are a generation that has spent our entire lives painfully away from how terrible humanity is to the environment, how painfully selfish we act during pandemics, and how vivid hate seeps into our society as Trump continuously gets elected. We are the generation that, through the merit of having parents who did not yet realize the true dangers of the internet, experienced war and genocide through a phone screen, and were told the entire time that we are the future who could fix this, while feeling entirely helpless to stop it. The result is a generation riddled with guilt and depressed nihilism. Where the 90s had cynicism and suicidal tendencies, we have apathy tortured by the blood-boiling need to fix the world. Winter, through his lyrics and his voice, portrays these emotions in a way that is uniquely Gen Z. He is ours. He speaks for us.

“Oh Charles, tell me about the end

You were there the day the music died

And I’ll be there the day it dies again

He said, “A masterpiece belongs to the dead

There are microphones under your bed

And there’s footage that will prove us both wrong”” 

Geese, Long Island City Here I Come

The lyrics in Geese songs are riddled with pain and a sense of hopelessness, though at the same time contradict their own hopelessness with the sense of trying. So many young rock enthusiasts have thrown their hands in the air and proudly proclaimed that they have given up on the idea of new, great music. They cannot care about this anymore. Winters greets us with a bitter smile and tells us that if that were true, we wouldn’t be watching him so carefully. Geese admit that the music is dead and will die again if we reclaim it, but if they truly believed that the music was lost and over, they wouldn’t still be trying. In six simple lines alone, Geese can completely embody what it means to be Gen Z. 

A Man With Mystique

It is by no means profound or original to pick on the low-hanging fruit that is Geese’s lack of talent. However, although they provide nothing worth listening to, they are an incredibly fascinating band to watch hit their 15 minutes of fame. Most bands today are forced to prostitute themselves across various social media platforms, begging viewers to click on their profile, follow, like and hopefully share – as now asking a fan to simply listen to the music even in a world of easy streaming feels like a pipe dream, and these monetized accounts are all they have, in order to grow a fan base. It is incredibly boring, gimmick-ridden and in your face. What’s worse, it creates a lull in music development where every band begins to sound the same and strives to make music that could make it viral or be a sound used in viral videos. Bands that fall into this trap, looking at you, Maneskin, rarely make it back out and lose what little respect they were able to cultivate from their fanbase to begin with.  

What makes Geese so unique, at least by the standards of Gen Z and the new generation of musicians, is their almost complete lack of social media presence. It is incredibly refreshing to see a band spring out from obscurity with a unique sound and a true air of mystique. Unlike Sombr, an indie trend already leaving the public hivemind, Winter is not pouting in front of the camera begging fans to play his music in their wet dreams. Across Instagram and TikTok, there are hundreds of thousands of wanna be rock bands desperate to be seen and get their five minutes of fame. They rely on looks, vintage fashion or covers to get past the dreaded five-second view drop on TikTok. These bands will go to any length to posture and pose as some great rock band, reminiscent of a band you actually want to listen to, with no real spin of their own to make them stand out and stay in your head for longer than it takes to scroll past the video. There is no mystery, there is no interest, and there is no respect. Would Guns N’ Roses’ Axl Rose stand in front of a phone camera trying to figure out vertical video and how to get the most views? No, he spent his early days trying to grow as a musician, drunk out of his mind in a Hep-C filled Los Angeles apartment, hiding from the cops and bringing back half-naked girls. It’s pathetic. When you saw a picture of Axl Rose or Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, or Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, it was from the press, an interview or a poster. It was interesting, and you had to come to them. 

Cameron Winter is undeniably sexy and has an uncanny ability to make you crave more of him. Winter, through sheer will and making his audience beg for him, has created the same sex appeal needed in a rockstar. Cameron Winter has no Instagram account, and he doesn’t seem to care if you listen to his music. He doesn’t need to market. He just is, and that is what truly makes him poetic. 

They Feel Real

The lack of social media presence is not the only thing that sets Geese apart. Geese, for as much as they sound like a dying Furby, at the very least sounds unique. Geese is on the verge of becoming one of the strangest yet most crucial rock bands in rock history, as Winter is extremely isolated in his sound at a time when all rock bands strive to sound the same or mimic one of the greats of the past. Geese is authentic. They sound like themselves. The market is oversaturated with artists attempting to sound like one of the greats of the past. Greta Van Fleet is trying to be Zeppelin, Liily wants to be Kasabian, and everyone wants to be The Strokes. Geese wants to just be. 

Through the band’s authenticity and mystery, this band has created a strange fixation that has taken the world by storm. Geese is one of the most important rock bands of the 2020s through the simple act of existing and creating new rock music for fans to consume. Perhaps what the rock scene needs right now is not some magic artist with music that rivals the greats, but someone who can inspire those artists and remind the world that rock is not dead. Music does not only exist as background noise of a TikTok video. These bands are important now more than ever, especially as the music community grieves the loss of MTV earlier this year. Geese give rock a pulse, although it lies comatose. Geese give us time to heal.