Receiving an ADHD diagnosis didn’t really impact me all that much. Working through the process and having a decent amount of self awareness, I wasn’t particularly surprised. But the thing that struck me most was this: most people’s brains aren’t firing off a thousand thoughts a minute. They can actually stop and focus on a single thing, get it done, then move on to the next. That my brain is constantly zipping and strafing from one thing to the next is not usual. That was an eye opener.
I guess that’s why I connect with Angine De Poitrine so much. Their music sounds like my brain feels.
That’s maybe not fair to the microtonal math party rockers, whose songs are in fact stunningly complex and well crafted, not random and scatterbrained as my thoughts are. But ever since their KEXP set launched them into a level of virality not seen since, I’d wager, OK GO, they’ve proven to be one of the strongest rebukes to generative AI imaginable. Two French Canadian dudes in papier-mâché heads, body paint and polka dotted jumpsuits, while guitarist Khn picks up his custom made dual necked guitar-bass and lays down track after looping track of the most intricate riffing you’ve ever heard, all while drummer Klek navigates time signatures between 7/8, 10/4 and good old 4/4.
There is simply no way AI could come up with anything even remotely close to this. The weirdness is too earned, too specific, too deeply human. And yet. That’s precisely where it gets interesting.
Enthusiasm or Outrage… The Algorithm Doesn’t Care.
Many in the r/indieheads community have voiced growing frustration at how relentlessly they’ve had the band pushed at them. Not just the KEXP set on repeat, but vinyl releases, obscure French TV interviews, a recent profile in The Guardian. Some have gone as far as labelling it an astroturfing campaign.
Here’s the thing though: it almost doesn’t matter whether it is.
Whether this is a deliberate manipulation campaign or simply the algorithm doing what algorithms do, the effect on the consumer is identical. You didn’t ask for it. You didn’t seek it out. It arrived anyway, again and again, until your resistance either broke into curiosity or hardened into resentment. The same algorithm (whether it’s Meta, Google or Reddit) pushes content designed for engagement, and engagement doesn’t discriminate between enthusiasm and outrage. It just wants you to keep scrolling.
I would argue that a platform like TikTok changed things permanently. Search engines, where you retained at least the illusion of agency, have given way to recommendation engines, where the content finds you. You are no longer the navigator. You are the destination.
And the nefarious gooey middle of all of this? You have far less control over what you engage with than you think you do.
There’s something else being lost here too, and it’s subtler but just as important. The joy of discovery.
Finding a band used to feel like an act of personal archaeology. You dug, you found, you evangelised. It was yours. That feeling of ownership, of having genuinely stumbled onto something, was a core part of what made music fandom meaningful. You didn’t just like the band. You found them. And that distinction mattered enormously when you were the one pressing play on a burned CD for a friend at 11pm on a Tuesday.
Now when something lands in your feed and you love it, there’s a nagging voice underneath the enthusiasm. Did I find this, or was I pointed here? Did Angine De Poitrine choose me, or did someone pay for that introduction? Even if the music is genuinely extraordinary, even if your emotional response is completely real, the provenance of the discovery feels compromised. And that erodes something that can’t easily be rebuilt.
For brands, this matters more than almost anything else. Word of mouth, the holy grail of marketing, is built entirely on that feeling of personal discovery and the very human desire to share it. If consumers can no longer fully trust that feeling, if every recommendation arrives with an asterisk, the entire referral economy gets murkier. The most powerful marketing tool ever invented quietly starts to rust.
The Cost of Doing Rock and Roll
Take Geese, the indie darlings of 2025, and another buzzy zeitgeist act that makes this millennial hipster very happy. Their music is genuinely extraordinary. And yet they found themselves at the centre of a significant controversy when a digital marketing firm called Chaotic Good was caught bragging to Billboard about flooding social media with bot accounts, artificial comments and manufactured engagement on behalf of their clients (with Geese listed prominently among them). The band hasn’t confirmed or denied it. Chaotic Good quietly scrubbed their website. And the internet, predictably, lost its mind.
But here’s what struck me most about the whole episode: the fans were angrier at the journalists who reported it than at the firm that did it. Because the music was real. The emotional connection was real. And no amount of bot traffic could fully account for that.
Which is exactly the point. Sit with that for a moment. Because if the artists you admire, the ones making genuinely original, emotionally resonant work, can have their rise entangled with artificial digital voices without anyone being entirely sure what was real and what wasn’t, what does that tell you about every other voice in your feed? The ones selling you insurance, athleisure, mortgage refinancing, energy drinks?
The manipulation isn’t coming. It’s already here. It’s already worked on you. Multiple times today, probably.
Reality Can Hijack the Algorithm
Businesses need to understand this. The old rulebook, the one built on brand principles, consistent messaging, integrated marketing comms pushed through established channels, isn’t wrong exactly. But it’s increasingly insufficient.
Consumers aren’t just divided in their attention. They’re divided in their trust. An increasingly dubious audience is filtering harder than ever for content that feels real, that speaks to something true, that doesn’t smell like it was optimised in a boardroom. Angine De Poitrine feels real. So too Geese. The art is genuine even when the distribution isn’t.
And that’s the insight brands need to sit with: reality can hijack the algorithm. A genuinely interesting, genuinely human piece of content (a story, a product, a goddamn point of view) can expand the aperture of your reach far beyond any traditional media plan, precisely because it gives the recommendation engine something worth recommending.
But you can’t fake the thing that makes it work. The algorithm harvests authenticity. It doesn’t manufacture it.
So find the real. Present the real. Build something worth pointing at.
Maybe just without the papier-mâché and the chest pains (go and Google what “Angine De Poitrine” actually translates to…).
