At this year’s Camp Flog Gnaw, Cameron Winter, bedraggled and haloed with characteristically greasy hair, hoisted his phone to the stage mic and unleashed a tinny yet valient version of fakemink’s ‘Kill Everything’ upon the cohort of unsuspecting Pitchfork partisans watching their set. The avant-garde revelation midway through Geese’s ‘2122’ was then, in froggish tones, acknowledged by the band’s singer: “if you’ve gotta leave our set to go see fakemink, you should do it… I wish he was our national treasure”. This contingent genuflection towards the British underground rapper seems like the perfect encapsulation of the ‘moment’ surrounding both artists. Besides offering the opportunity to the worst person you know to repost the clip on their Instagram story, it invites comparison of both artists’ trajectory on path for the mainstream.

Geese? fakemink? Not heard of them? Visit your local performative male, the nearest Sidge girlie or non-binary equivalent of a Radio 6 dad. They’ve perhaps been alternating between Geese’s new album Getting Killed and fakemink’s labyrinth of recent singles. The latter’s wry chorus on EsDeeKid’s ‘LV Sandals’ was stuck in the head of anyone with a pair of Salomons this Summer. Comparison is however not invited in regard to their respective sounds, NME’s wet dream: Geese, a sprawling, groove-based art rock-band, do not seem like close siblings to fakemink’s sample-heavy rap production and distinctly Bri’ish vocals. More like distant cousins, they are united less by sonic similarities than by plentiful cultural acclaim.

“More like distant cousins, they are united less by sonic similarities than by plentiful cultural acclaim”

‘Geese, fakemink, EsDeeKid, Geese again, Cameron Winter, Alpaca IPA’ now feels the emergent stism replacing the more juvenile ’Fontaines D.C., Palestine, Kneecap, split the G, Paul Mescal’s tiny shorts’. It now seems impossible to turn a swipe-like corner on Instagram Reels without encountering an endorsement for one of these artists. Geese have been inundated with compliments from the likes of Cillian Murphy, Patti Smith, Lewis Capaldi and Nick Cave - while Paul Thomas Anderson and Benny Safdie were recently spotted Winter’s concert at Carnegie Hall. fakemink’s trajectory has been no less conspicuous: appearances on stage with Drake at this summer’s Wireless Festival and at Playboi Carti’s Los Angeles show in October, endorsements from Timothée Chalamet and Frank Ocean, or the recent photoshoot with Supreme all seem to have secured his place as the underground’s reigning darling.

“Devoted to decoding the band’s freakish, yet impressionistically poetic frontman”

Their cultural ‘moment’ appears to mirror the rapid expanding of their fanbases. fakemink’s Spotify monthly listeners have rocketed from roughly 48,000 this time last year to over six million, while Geese’s audience has grown since the release of their new album. The question, then, is why? Both artists make interesting music, certainly – but how have they managed so effortlessly to capture the contemporary ‘alternative’ cultural psyche?

What becomes apparent are two very distinct models of growth, each driven by a mixture of word-of-mouth circulation and social media hype. mink’s drowning FL Studio beats, crudely braggadocios lyricism and post-Tinie-Tempah vocal affectations appear to draw a London-oriented fanbase obsessed as much with the 20-year-old internet personality as with the music itself. Clustered loosely with artists from the same ‘underground’ ecosystem: Feng, YT or Fimiguerrero, yet sonically ahead of his contemporaries, fakemink occupies a space populated by popular losers in fur coats with questionable body odour, nostalgia-baiting themselves for an early 2000s style – where Instagram accounts like @undergroundsound.uk & @sadprt function as stand-ins for cringeworthy MySpace-era discourse.

“Populated by popular losers in fur coats with questionable body odour, nostalgia-baiting themselves for an early 2000s style”

fakemink, then, feels like a relatively authentic case of an online fanbase translating into a tangible, real-world success with a careful cultivation of opacity. To an extent, this is also true of Geese. The band’s presence within the new genre of rainbow-backgrounded-Instagram-create-mode content is frequently accompanied by ‘Au Pays Du Cocaine’ or ‘Love Takes Miles’, alongside an intensely committed online fanbase devoted to decoding the band’s freakish, yet impressionistically poetic frontman. Their success, however, appears more directly tethered to institutional seals of approval from music journalism’s established gatekeepers. NME named ‘Taxes’ the second-best song of the year and Getting Killed as its number one album of the year; Rolling Stone placed it fifth, Pitchfork seventh, while Spotify’s editors ensured placements for both Geese and Cameron Winter in their year-end song selections.

This repetitive, borderline didactic ‘shoving-down-the-throat’ is not, however unwarranted. Getting Killed is to men with leather shoulder bags what Fontaines D.C.’s Romance was to women with Adidas Sambas last year: a top-to-tail exercise in accomplished pop songwriting set to deceptively simple instrumentals and buoyed by stellar production. Departing from their earlier sound on 2023’s 3D Country, the tribal drumming, tumbling pianos, chiming guitar riffs, and Winter’s looping lyrical motifs are generous enough to reward both the casual listener and the terminally invested.

So, what of it? Do the means by which these subalterns have attained hegemony actually matter? Both artists offer up art that sustains both shared and divided audiences – music that can be enjoyed by a Trinmo devotee or Newnham Engling if they are willing to push the boat out… their big green boat.