“We need white boys to start bands in their parents’ garages again,” the desperate posts cry—usually in response to some nostalgic resurfaced clip of Green Day or Linkin Park performing in the early 2000s. Sometimes the sentiment appears beneath footage of whatever young, buzzy, and arguably culturally appropriative white rapper is currently having a moment (this summer, that honor went to Ian). Other times it pops up under a podcast clip of a group of white guys opining on modern feminism or offering step-by-step guides to “looksmaxxing” and achieving alpha-male status.
This recurring garage-band demand asks whether we’ll ever return to a time when white men in pop culture didn’t need to rely on cultural appropriation or provocation to stay relevant. It wonders if we’ll go back to the late ’90s and early 2000s, when the most influential white male figures weren’t subjugating minorities or mining them for their sounds and aesthetics, but instead were committing to guitar-led bands that provided an angsty, pop-punk soundtrack to anti-establishment sentiments that defined the post-9/11 era. And this year, to some widely felt relief, bands like Geese and Wallows, along with artist Djo, have stepped in to fill that cultural gap.
This past summer, the rock band Geese (who didn’t start in a garage but would practice in member Max Bassin's Brooklyn basement, so, close enough.) shot from if-you-know-you-know status to social-media dominance. The release of their fourth (or third, depending on who you ask–they scratched their first release from streaming services) studio album, Getting Killed, followed months of acclaim for frontman Cameron Winter’s debut solo project, Heavy Metal, which dropped last December. This past weekend, Cameron headlined a sold-out show at Carnegie Hall that drew stars like Lucas Hedges and Joe Keery (aka Djo, a fellow crooning white boy with a guitar), along with filmmakers Paul Thomas Anderson and Benny Safdie, who documented the night with a full film crew—setting off gossip that a Cameron documentary may be in the works.
The warm embrace Geese/Cameron have received from audiences and industry titans alike comes as undeniably garage music-esque acts like Djo and Wallows crawl toward the kind of mainstream success their early 2000s influences enjoyed in an era TikTok has dubbed “the golden age of white boys.” Back when “My Own Worst Enemy” was a guaranteed needle drop in every teen comedy, and Sum 41, The White Stripes, and Green Day topped charts, defined style, and sat at the center of cultural relevance.
Is it regressive to yearn for a time when straight white men reigned supreme in mainstream media? Probably. But I think the desire is informed by the fact that they’ve continued to reign anyway—just through far less pure and entertaining avenues (like manosphere podcasts and, you know, outright cultural theft).
Gen Z’s exhaustion with those trends explains the enthusiasm around Djo earning his first-ever Billboard #1, or the Wallows appearing at nearly every major festival, and it helps clarify the hunger for Geese, who’s been lovingly referred to as “Gen Z’s first great rock band.” There have been plenty of Gen Z rock acts, but the celebrity fanfare this one’s beginning to receive recalls a Gen X and millennial Hollywood ecosystem. This isn’t recession-indicator music; what they offer draws from sounds and cultural moments that seem to predate 2008. What we’re seeing is a callback to some true Bush administration-era rockstar types.
There’s no fixed definition of the “white boy garage music” genre. I’d call it a catch-all term for alt- or indie-rock-adjacent music that grapples with finding identity during socially, politically, and economically fraught times. These are the kinds of topics that might get a well-to-do suburban white boy scolded at dinner if he raised them, but which he can fully unpack and release in a garage with a few buddies. The white boy garage music we so desperately want has no true victims, aside from girls who’ve been ghosted and their future therapists. White boy garage music speaks to themes of love, strife, and emotional chaos that remain relatable even to people who aren’t white boys with garages. That universality is its beauty.
There are plenty of jokes about why this very specific subgenre disappeared from the mainstream, they mainly blame the housing crisis (TikTok insights include: “Garages are unaffordable, it’s time to start playing under overpasses or some shit,” and “The HOA killed the rock star”), but this year’s emergence and success of acts that clearly fall within the category offers a small beacon of light for the future of white boy garage music. All hope for catchy, angsty white boy music is not lost yet. Maybe next they’ll start putting the podcast mics down for a while.
