There’s a specific kind of irony to sitting down and writing a blog post about a band’s album that is, more or less, about people who cannot stop making things and being on the internet. I am one of those people. I’ve been chronically online since I was a kid. Making a MySpace is the first time I ever found myself in trouble. I make content for myself, I make content for clients, and I spend a genuinely unwholesome troublesome amount of time thinking about how things are said, sold, and staged online.

So when I tell you that Goose’s BIG MODERN! rollout got its hooks in me, understand that I’m the exact person the album is describing. I did not observe this campaign from a safe critical distance. I was standing inside it, in a hot pink and bright yellow pop-up shop in New York City, feeling completely at home.

But let me back up.

Who is Goose, and why should you care

If you don’t know Goose, here’s the short version: they’re a jam band. Improvisational, live-music-first, the kind of band whose fans travel to shows and know the songs by heart. The jam world usually runs on touring, word of mouth, and a certain anti-hype ethos. You don’t typically see this scene doing Morse code websites and courtside stunts at Madison Square Garden. All of that is a little more pop/main stream than what the scene usually brings in.

Goose does. And that’s largely because of Rick Mitarotonda, the band’s frontman, who has always been branding-first and a world-builder at heart. GQ interviewed the band last summer under the headline “How the Millennial Jam Gods Built an Empire of Chill” — tracking them across the season up to a curfew-breaking, career-biggest show at Madison Square Garden. Empires don’t get built by accident. (And not to brag, but I was there with my hubs!!!) The band is a brand. The latest album has a storyline. This is not a group that stumbled into a clever marketing campaign. It’s a philosophy they’ve been running for years.

Which is exactly why the big swing worked.

The groundwork I keep thinking about

It’s so easy to gawk at the stunts. The guerrilla signage, the mysterious website, the actor at the basketball game. Fun to look at. Easy to talk about.

But the stunts are not the story. The story is everything that came before them.

So by the time BIG MODERN! showed up with its loud, weird, high-production rollout, none of it felt like it came out of nowhere. We’d already spent a year watching Goose build worlds and hand them over. The guerrilla campaign wasn’t the start of the story. It was the next chapter of one we’d been reading all along — which is probably why it hit me the way it did.

What the album is actually about

Okay. The record itself.

BIG MODERN! is about what it feels like to be alive right now — specifically, the overstimulated, hyperconnected, permanently-online version of right now.

The dopamine flood.
The doomscroll.
Prepackaged emotion delivered on demand for your entertainment.
The strange modern ritual of worshipping the projection of yourself that you put out into the world.

Rick described the whole thing as an absurdist reflection of the confusion of existing today. That’s the key word: reflection. The album isn’t lecturing you from above about how bad your phone is and how fucked technology is becoming. It’s sitting in the sauce with you. There’s no judgment, no superiority, no “kids these days.” It’s more like — we’re all in this together, it feels kind of amazing and kind of hollow at the same time, and how long can any of it last?

The marketing became the message

Here’s where my marketer brain and my fan brain collapsed into the same brain.

The genius of this rollout is that the campaign didn’t just advertise the album’s theme. It enacted it. The marketing was the message that literally put us in the story. Watch how cleanly each piece literally stacks on the last:

The guerrilla signage. “BIG MODERN!” plastered around New York, Chicago, Denver, Philadelphia, with zero context, no explanation, no connection to anything. Which is exactly what modern life feels like — a wall of loud, confident noise that may or may not mean anything at all.

The website, bigmodern.com. Interactive, and it changed over time. Morse code, hidden messages tucked into metadata, breadcrumbs for fans to decode, and — this is the part that got me — interactive messaging built from Goose fans’ own thoughts typed into a box on certain iterations of the site. You went to the site and got your own inputs reflected back at you. If you’ve ever felt like the internet is just a hall of mirrors made of your own posts, that’s the entire experience of being “so connected,” turned into a website.

The pop-up shop. This is where I come in, because I got to go. There was merch, sure. But there was also a wall — a physical wall — covered in submissions from the bigmodern.com website. The digital thing made tangible. All those anonymous fan thoughts that had been floating around online, now printed and mounted in a room you could stand in. Everything was hot pink and bright yellow. It felt like walking into a different world.

That’s a strange sentence to sit with. A campaign about the disorienting overwhelm of being online, and I walk into its physical manifestation. But that’s the whole point, isn’t it. I live here. The overstimulation isn’t foreign to me and it likely isn’t to you either. It’s the water I swim in. Recognizing yourself in the funhouse mirror is not exactly comfortable, but it is honest.

The Jake Lacy stunt. They got the actor from The White Lotus and The Office to do a four-minute rant as an unhinged executive, then sat courtside at a Knicks game wearing bright yellow hoodies spelling out “FACE.” Celebrity, spectacle, image, the performance of importance. All the things the album is poking at.

The listening parties. And then, right before the album officially dropped (which was filled with mostly new songs), the counterweight. Vinyl bars and hi-fi lounges across the country, gathering people into rooms to play the album together before release. After all that noise — the signage, the codes, the stunts, the mirror — the payoff was people sitting in a room, present, listening to something together. (Gosh I was so jealous. I love where I live but I would have loved a listening party with fans before the album went live)! I don’t think that contrast was an accident.

Why I actually wrote this

I want to be honest with you about something. There isn’t a tidy five-step lesson at the end of this. I didn’t write this so I could pivot into “and here’s what marketing teams can learn from Goose.” That would cheapen it, and you’d smell it a mile away.

I wrote this because I loved it. Because it’s rare to watch a piece of marketing that is genuinely about something, where the strategy and the story are the same object, where the way a thing is sold is inseparable from what the thing means. That almost never happens. Most marketing is a wrapper. This was the whole gift.

And I wrote it because of that hot pink room. Because of the community I stood in line with to get into the pop-up. Because a band made a sprawling, absurd, self-aware piece of art about people who cannot log off — and one of those people, a person who has been online since childhood and who does this for a living, walked into the physical center of it and felt, of all things, like she belonged.

That’s the part that stays with me.

How long can this feeling last? I don’t know. But I’m glad I got to stand in the middle of it for a minute.