“When 1,000 people come to see you at a gas station at 20 minutes’ notice, that’s a real ego trip”: Meet Silly Goose, the band filling nu-metal’s tank

“We’re in… Kentucky right now…” Jackson Foster says with questionable certainty. “I’m not exactly sure where.” Last night his band, nu-metallers Silly Goose, played in Toronto with rising French metalcore heroes LANDMVRKS, and are now on the 14-hour haul back to their native Atlanta, Georgia.

The frontman is sitting cross legged with the sun on his face, a vast meadow separating him from the tour bus that’s taking him and his bandmates Alan Benikhis (drums) and Ian Binion (guitar) on the remaining 260-odd miles home. It was in this very state a few years back, while eating breakfast at a diner, that someone recognised Jackson as the frontman of Silly Goose in a locale other than a music venue.

His face became more recognisable in August of this year, however, when the trio played a series of guerilla gigs in the car park of a Chicago petrol station to accompany their appearance at the city’s Lollapalooza festival.

Despite reportedly having permission from the manager to do so, and the show being the third successive night they’d played there, the police turned up and the frontman ended up being arrested for criminal trespassing. The fans were behind Jackson, though, with a GoFundMe set up to cover his legal costs soon hitting its $8,000 target. Despite the drama, Jackson can’t help but be thrilled by the something-from-nothing chaos of it all.

“When I can have 1,000 people at a gas station for a show that didn’t exist 20 minutes ago, that is pretty sick and a real adrenaline and ego trip,” he explains. “They create opportunities and force people to hear us. We’d had plenty of experiences of playing shows in venues to nobody and we were sick of nobody knowing our band, so we thought, ‘Fuck it!’”

Having built a reputation for playing unorthodox spaces ranging from subway cars – in their video for last year’s Bad Behavior – to Subway sandwich shops, Jackson is confident that Silly Goose’s efforts on forthcoming second album Keys To The City will render those headline-grabbing displays less important. “I feel like we are starting to be able to get away from that a little bit.”

Jackson, Alan and Ian have operated under the name Silly Goose for five years, bound by being the musical outcasts in the Atlanta scene, as well as a deep love for Rage Against The Machine, Limp Bizkit and Hed PE – whose 2000 album, Broke, is Jackson’s all-time favourite. After releasing their EP, The Goose Is Out Of The Bag in 2021, SG unleashed their full-length debut, The Streets Heard It First, a raucous piece of nu-metal revivalism.

While its follow-up, Keys To The City, retains many of those infectious ingredients, it’s infused with more depth than their characteristic party chronicling and a greater degree of fury.

“I feel there are a lot of people who follow the band who have been waiting for me to get angry,” says Jackson, “so I’m eagerly awaiting people’s reactions to those new tracks.”

The targets of that ire include the sizeable cut that venues take when Silly Goose play their shows, as explored on Give Me My Money, one of Jackson’s favourites on the record.

“Trying to leave a tour with enough money, and to get paid fairly for what we’re doing. That song deals with my frustrations with that, and I guess you could say the music industry as a whole.”

Meanwhile, to prove not everything is so serious, Traffic does exactly what it says on the tin, rallying against their hometown’s gridlocked streets. “Atlanta has the worst traffic of any city I’ve ever been to.”

Let’s see if he’s still saying that after Silly Goose make their first-ever appearances in the UK this number, both under their own banner and as the guests of Hot Milk.

“Playing somewhere for the first time where we know we already have fans is insane,” says an excited Jackson. “It’s one of the biggest thrills and something I still can’t get over.”

Keys To The City is out now via Blue Grape. Silly Goose tour the UK with Hot Milk from November 17, with their own dates starting on November 23.

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