Ashlee Simpson, Fear, DJ Khaled, Lana Del Rey, and… Geese?!? Yes, you read that right: social media’s elder-millennial and Gen-X contingent would have you believe that Geese’s SNL appearance on Saturday night is now one of the worst in the show’s 51-year history. In a recent email forwarded to me, music critic Bob Lefsetz wrote that “despite all the hosannas in the press, the word [about Geese] does not seem to be spreading.” Look, Geese have over 2 million monthly listeners on Spotify, sold out their recent US tour, and got invited to perform on one of the oldest network television shows still going. Maybe it doesn’t matter what the rock rags are saying about these four New Yorkers, but it’s not like Geese is some obscure underground band. They don’t need an SNL cast member stumping for them like John Belushi did for Fear in 1981 (though somebody in the writer’s room is responsible for pitching James Austin Johnson’s Cameron Winter impression last month). It’s OK to acknowledge that the hype exists, even if you’re not opening your wallet to it anytime soon.
But the cranks just don’t dig the kids. SNL subreddits clocked Geese for being a “god-awful,” “astroturfed band” performing songs off Lou Reed and Metallica’s Lulu album. Yikes. One user even claimed that they would “genuinely rather listen to AI music with royalties that go to diddy’s defense team” than spend even a second with Getting Killed. Double yikes. @rychkid on X wrote, “So, Geese is about the worst band I’ve ever seen on #SNL, and I’ve been watching since 1977.” If he’s telling the truth (he’s probably not), then that means he tuned in on October 21, 1978 when Frank Zappa hosted the show and got himself banned. Maybe @rychkid was waving his fist in disapproval when Elvis Costello started playing “Radio, Radio,” or started clutching a rosary when Sinead O’Connor ripped up the photo of Pope John Paul II. He must have called in sick when Mk.gee came by the show in 2024. Sure, Fear tore apart the SNL studio when they played, but at least the show was somewhat game to do some weirdo shit back then. One of the coolest moments in the show’s history was when Harry Dean Stanton and the Replacements got drunk before the show went to air and proceeded to get even drunker as the night went on. Every time I imagine a 4-foot-11 Lorne Michaels fuming over that, my cheeks get sore from grinning.
The funniest part about all of this is that Geese didn’t do anything crazy on SNL. But the discourse around their two songs (“Trinidad” and “Au Pays du Cocaine”) would have you convinced that they held all of Studio 8H at gunpoint and made everyone in the audience watch the ending of Marley & Me, or something. Of course, if you’ve only heard of Geese but have never actually listened to their music, their performance of “Au Pays du Cocaine” may not have been the most convincing introduction. But SNL is infamously a terrible venue for live music. Dijon was able to mostly bypass the studio’s awful sound quality late last year, but the only “all-time great” musical performance in the 2020s is still Jack White’s last-minute appearance during COVID. By the time Geese got around to “Trinidad” as the clock flirted with 1 a.m., they’d found a groove—and by “groove,” I mean a furious ear-bursting seance of bedeviled rock music. But outlandishness abounds, and the taste of Geese remains an acquired one.
This Geese hate, well that’s a tale older than Geese and older than the people dismissing them—because every generation is mortified by the musicians that come from the next. It’s the ultimate age-gap disconnection, a humiliation ritual passed down through ancestry like a hereditary condition. Luckily Paste bought into Geese’s stock a long time ago: we named them the Best of What’s Next in 2021, wrote a cover story on them in 2023, and, just last summer, gave their album Getting Killed a rare perfect score. Personally, I think they’re making art that rises up to the cultural moment that people in their twenties are experiencing right now. Will Geese actually save rock and roll? Maybe not yours, but somebody’s. After all, in 20, maybe 30 years, those are the people that will be deciding whether or not Geese are, in fact, one of the all-time great bands. That’s how this shit works, right? The people with boots on the ground get to peel the back off the label. 50 years ago a bunch of writers said that Hendrix was the greatest guitarist of all time and now we’re all like, yeah, Hendrix is the greatest guitarist of all time.
It’s very possible that Geese doesn’t end up being one of the best bands ever. But nobody’s saying that they’re the Beatles, nor should they. They’re just Geese. Love them or hate them, it’s pretty cool that a couple of twenty-somethings got invited to perform on network television and chose to play “Trinidad,” a truly batshit song where Cameron Winter yells “there’s a bomb in my car” over and over. Remember when Phoebe Bridgers tried smashing her guitar on stage during SNL and middle-aged men lost their minds over it? We go through this shit every couple of years: older people (mostly guys, let’s be real here) can’t fathom a younger artist even existing, let alone playing a song on a TV broadcast. Ageism is a terrible, terrible drug of paranoia that’ll have people convinced that Geese makes music in a completely different language. I implore anybody reading this to fix your heart and listen to “Cobra.” Art is supposed to pass you by. It’s a good thing to feel out of touch.
But, then again, SNL is pretty awful programming, so I don’t know what cultural sway it even has in 2026. It’s probably not a lot. The showrunners can’t even be fucked to produce any meaningful criticism of Donald Trump or what’s happening with ICE in this country right now. So maybe Geese playing SNL isn’t that big of a deal, but it’s not like they got caught lip-syncing, smoked a blunt on stage, or ripped the studio apart. All they did was yell “there’s a bomb in my car” on live television and actually sound halfway decent on one of the worst soundstages in network television. If you don’t like Geese, I implore you to step back and ask yourself, “Do I hate this music because it’s actually bad, or do I hate this music because I’m not a part of its target demographic?” No matter the answer, I think you should chill out. Some folks think cilantro tastes like soap. It’s just rock and roll, man.
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