After a bonkers media blitz filled with everything from cryptic websites to matching jumpsuits, all of it bathed in the brain-scrambling hues of lemon yellow and hot pink, indie jam favorites Goose have finally announced their new album, BIG MODERN!
The news arrives today along with the album’s first single, “Good2B,” a vintage Goose gem that offers a kind of counter-weight to all the mayhem that’s led up to its release. “Good2b is a sort of surrendering to an ecstasy in all of that chaos,” Goose guitarist/frontman Rick Mitarotonda tells Rolling Stone via email. “A personal oasis in the algorithm. It’s that moment when the entire world of content and convenience is at your fingertips, and shaking your ass just feels right. It’s a good day, with the quietly looming question: wait, is it though? Nvm yea it’s sick.”
BIG MODERN! marks Goose’s sixth studio album, and it’s set to drop June 12 on No Coincidence Records. The album finds the band contending with the erratic, confounding, alluring absurdity of contemporary life — a delirious sensation they aimed to cultivate with the rollout campaign.
Over the past few weeks, Goose have hosted a website, BigModern.com, which offers visitors a chance to send “signals” into an unknown ether. Eventually, they added a link to a video, featuring actor Jake Lacy (The White Lotus) playing a boneheaded record exec trying to convince Goose to overhaul their creative vision. (Among the choicest lines: “I’ve run it up the flagpole here, and it turns out, nobody wants to have a half-mast, C-tier, ham band wankin’ on their feelings for 20 minutes at a time the whole time. Who knew? Not you, obviously.”)
To cap it all off, over the weekend, Goose showed up at Madison Square Garden with Lacy, where they sat court-side for a Knicks/Bulls game. While Lacy was still in his record exec get-up, all four members of Goose were wearing matching jumpsuits with that yellow-and-pink color scheme, their sweaters spelling out the word “FACE.”
Mitarotonda says the ideas the band has been toying with are “an absurdist reflection of the confusion of existing in today’s world.” He continues: “Over-stated guerrilla marketing campaign with zero context or direct connection to anything, video of a 5-minute rant from an unhinged executive, showing up at an NBA game in ridiculous sweatsuits… The album is a dispatch from interesting times, without judgment or superiority.”
As disjointed as this experience is, Mitarotonda notes there’s something universal about it. “We’re all in it the same,” he says, adding: “The overstimulating high-resolution world of content streaming directly into your brain, in real time, all the time. Synthetic, prepackaged human emotion on demand for your entertainment. The nightly doomscroll bliss. The relentless worship of the projection of an image of self to the world. Identity as a brand. Your FACE… on your FACE. Somehow, more becomes less. Something is lost, but we’re not totally sure what it is. It’s awesome, and it’s terrifying.”
BIG MODERN! arrives on the heels of Goose’s two 2025 albums, Everything Must Go and Chain Yer Dragon. As always, the band has a ton of tour dates lined up for this spring and summer: A first North American leg kicks off April 10 in Asheville, North Carolina, and wraps April 25 in Irving, Texas; a second gets underway June 13 in Toronto, with shows scheduled all the way through the end of August.
