By Grayson Haver Currin,Jeremy Liebman

Copyright gq

Cameron Winter doesn’t smile when he sees me.
It’s 8:03 on a Sunday morning in Silver Lake, a mile below the hillside house that Winter and his band, Geese, have been living in for the past week. Winter told me last night to meet him here, in a cavernous coffee shop whose high ceilings threaten to swallow up all conversation, at 8:30 a.m. I arrived early so that I could sit silently for a spell, to think about anything other than interviewing the 23-year-old songwriter who has handled almost every journalist he’s spoken with during the last year the same amused way a cat might treat a toy stuffed with catnip, batting it around for his own entertainment. Winter loves jokes, fables, and other forms of conversational defense that quickly become offense. I didn’t want to fret about my strategy, at least for a second.
But when I arrive, Winter is already settled at the two-top closest to the door, wearing enormous black headphones and glaring at his laptop like it holds some sacred secret. I shuffle to his table and stand there until he notices. He pushes back one can, but his lumberjack jaw remains fixed. “Find me whenever you’re ready,” I say. He makes eye contact, nods once appreciatively, slides the headphones into place, and gets back to work. Half an hour later, he appears with his book bag packed, its straps awkwardly tugging against his faded pink Elvis T-shirt. “Good morning,” he finally says, his voice a breaking baritone. “Let’s go outside.”
When we sit down, I ask Winter if he was finishing the song I’d watched Geese start recording yesterday evening at the same downtown Los Angeles studio, Putnam Hill, where they made the year’s most thrilling rock record, Getting Killed, back in January. They’d cut six songs in six days and, as I left the studio, were starting the seventh. The new one had a name, “Lyin,” but no firm lyrics or arrangement yet. He shakes his head. I later learn he was studying Japanese.
“It wasn’t written until last night, but it’s sounding pretty good, actually. All these songs so far have gone pretty well, which is unusual for us,” he says, leaning back and crossing his legs beneath basketball shorts. “I’m optimistic. There’s still room to maneuver these songs the way I want them, still time.”
In the last 12 months alone, Winter has started or finished four albums, two of which already feel like new landmarks. In December, he issued his first solo album, Heavy Metal. Intentionally buried amid year-end release-schedule doldrums by his label because of low commercial expectations, it became a true artistic and commercial breakthrough. It’s one of the most staggering singer-songwriter records released this century, an album that Nick Cave rightfully called “a racked and wondrous thing.”
The response to Heavy Metal steeled Winter to make Getting Killed with Geese, a New York crew of four equally eccentric high-school chums who are evolving at the sort of rapid rate that makes me resent not their youth and energy but the fact that they grew up able to stream the world’s sounds and internalize them. Getting Killed rips open the carcasses of Radiohead, Pavement, and Swans and feasts there, looking up with a big, bloody grin. It’s a 46-minute torrent of exhilarating ideas and existential collapses, all bound by precision hooks and buoyed by massive rhythms. And as Winter sits in this coffee shop on August 17, six weeks before Getting Killed’s release in late September, Geese are five days away from finishing what may be its follow-up. Meanwhile, back home in New York, the sessions for Heavy Metal’s successor are also well underway. Winter has Dropbox folders, a few people tell me, stuffed with a thousand unused songs.
I have been writing about music for exactly as long as Winter, drummer Max Bassin, guitarist Emily Green, and bassist Dom DiGesu have been alive, but I have maybe never been so stirred by the possibilities of a young band, by their potential to make something new out of all they have learned and are actively learning. They may be Gen Z’s first great American rock band, the rare group in 2025 that reorients our attention toward rock’s future, away from its past.
But what, I want to know on this Sunday morning, about their own past? During the last five years, since they signed a record deal at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, a few repeated narrative threads have converged for Geese. They are upper-middle-class New York kids who started a band in high school and were about to break up when Covid canceled their college plans. They are quiet, weird, and funny—or, as Bassin puts it with a smile, “All super fucking undiagnosed autistic, terrible hangs.” They are not to be confused with Goose, because one bird can only entertain you for so long.
Geese have managed their story so successfully, in part, because Winter can be so guarded in interviews. When asked something, he pauses for so long it’s tempting to interrupt the silence and ask something else. In our five hours of conversation, I spend at least thirty cumulative minutes waiting him out. (He and his mom think this stems from a concussion he got while playing hockey in eighth grade, though his dad insists it’s simply his nature.) When he answers, the response is very often a very good joke or even a lie, like a trap carefully set in chess. He has insisted he made Heavy Metal in various Guitar Center stores around New York (not true) and once told The New York Times that Geese employed a little elfin helper named Ezekiel (I have yet to meet him).
Only two minutes after we sit down outside, Winter tries one of his trademark quips. When I ask about the first time he met Kenny Beats, the burly and gregarious producer who made Getting Killed and will meet Geese back in his studio in two hours, Winter tells me how Beats—who has since changed his professional name to Kenny Blume—stormed into the band’s backstage tent during Austin City Limits last year and demanded they work together. He compares Blume to Godzilla. “So we pepper-sprayed him,” Winter deadpans.
I want to laugh, but I don’t, because I actually want Winter to tell me something new about himself, about how he hears music, about how one of the most singular young singer-songwriters to emerge in this country in decades also leads one of its best rock bands. When I don’t chuckle, his expression shifts, his brown eyes becoming a little wider.
During the next hour, he relaxes and then gushes, funny and opinionated and erudite. He tells me about trying to write novels when he was 11 and how he cares so little about how much money he might or might not be making he doesn’t even have the Chase app. He tears up while he plays me Nico’s “The Fairest of the Seasons,” guiding me through the chord changes and the tension of the strings as he streams it from his phone and saying that, at one point, its lyrics were “exactly my life.” He tells me about finally listening to Bob Dylan at 18, how “Blowin’ in the Wind” was so stark it almost made him have a panic attack. He becomes rhapsodic when he talks about free jazz players Sonny Sharrock and Albert Ayler, how you can hear them testing their limits in real time. That’s what he loves to hear in his own music: the effort.
“I like the feeling of hearing people struggling against their own limits, like trying to break through. They go to the very tippy-top of what they think they’re capable of, and that’s why it’s beautiful,” he says during a breathless two-minute monologue, emphasizing every phrase with his hands. “It’s why people watch the bloopers of news reporters laughing like a regular person more than they ever watch the fucking news. That’s more interesting, because it makes you feel something.”
When I laugh, he smiles and sweeps his brown hair off of his face. But he wants me to know that he doesn’t see that—or any of this stuff, really—as work.
“I’d be doing this, no matter what was happening, making the songs. It takes a lot of time and energy, but work is a very different thing to me. You go in and get paid by the hour for the sake of money,” says Winter, a former dog-walker. “But work is a very cynical way to look at this, and I don’t give a shit about hard work. It makes no sense to me. There’s discipline involved. There’s misery. But work? That’s a different thing.”

The day before Winter and I arrive at the coffee shop too early, I drive to Geese’s hilltop rental just before 9 a.m. They have a full Saturday afternoon of recording planned, so they wanted to meet on the early side to talk for the first time. We gather around a kitchen table crowded with cups of coffee and flaky pastries. Bassin sits in a corner, playing classic rock from a small Bluetooth speaker, while Winter clutches an oversized box of Frosted Flakes to his chest the way a toddler might cling to his blanket.
The first thing I do is apologize—a full-band interview (with a publicist sitting at the end of the table, no less) on a gray Saturday morning when everyone is thinking about recording is a worst-case scenario, like going on four blind dates at once while being chaperoned by a parent. And then I tell them that, earlier that morning, I listened to “Cherry Skies,” a piece of piano pop about popping pills to stave off depression. They recorded it when they were all around 13, before Winter’s voice had deepened and broadened and when Bassin simply bashed the drums. They all smile. “There are some other years on that Bandcamp page,” Winter mumbles sleepily. “I don’t know if they have taken them down or not.”
The Bandcamp page belongs to the Park Slope Rock School, founded in 2008 in the Brooklyn neighborhood near where Winter, Green, and Bassin all grew up. At least one parent of all three played music. Green’s dad, Andy, toured with John Cale for years, and her parents met while he was playing a gig at the Mercury Lounge. Bassin’s dad—Michael, who died from cancer his family believes was caused by inhaling fumes on 9/11, when Bassin was four—was a bigwig at music distribution firm ADA. Winter’s mom, Molly, loves singing and playing guitar at open mics, while his dad, Stewart, is a composer who did sound design for Sesame Street before founding a large commercial library of music for videos.
Winter enrolled around six, soon after he started taking piano lessons; Bassin, who had developed his sense of rhythm by tap-dancing, did, too. Green arrived three years later. “My dad had me learning guitar, and it was as much a him thing as me thinking it was interesting,” she says sheepishly. “I was pretty bad at it for a long time. I was pretty bad at most things—that was the norm.”
Every four months or so, the kids would be sorted into different bands, based on what they played and how they played it. This wasn’t like School of Rock, where everything hinged on mastering covers, but more like a Montessori school for little musicians, where the kids were encouraged to write their own material and pursue what they could imagine. All classmates at Brooklyn Friends School, the trio got good at gaming the system so that they repeatedly wound up grouped together, in bands with names like Dinosaurs Are Dead, Kung Fu Panda 5, Floor With Syrup, and Somewhat Sticky.
They loved being in a band together, but frustrations steadily mounted. Dubbed the “songwriter extraordinaire” by the Rock School, Winter hated the way the band’s recordings sounded. “They wouldn’t sound like regular songs. They would sound worse,” he says, everyone nodding in agreement. “I guess whoever was in the studios thought this bunch of kids was beneath their time.”
And just as high school began, the three got linked with a stranger who was supposed to be their singer but shared neither their skills nor camaraderie. They knew the time had come to start a band beyond the program.
“She really didn’t understand music very well. She would ask, like, how many seconds she was supposed to wait before she came in. I don’t know, just count in,” says Bassin, laughing so hard he has to catch his breath. “We all had the realization that this was getting ridiculous, that we should be doing this ourselves.”
At 14, Winter and Bassin decided to build a studio in Bassin’s mom’s Brooklyn basement. The recording gear his late father had owned was still around, so they could repurpose it. The initial thought had been for Winter to play keys and sing, while Bassin would record everything else. Green asked if she could help, so she began stopping by the basement, too. She had shipped off to Little Red School House, across the East River in Manhattan, for high school. She met DiGesu there on her first day and beams as she shows me a blurry photo of him from back then. She invited DiGesu to see her Park Slope Rock School performance with Winter, Bassin, and the unnamed singer who could not count in.
“I just remember looking at you and saying, ‘Who is this girl hanging out with all the guys?’” Winter says, grinning across the table at DiGesu. Everyone erupts as DiGesu explains that he’d yet to cross the five-foot threshold, weighed 80 pounds, and had the same glorious mop of brown curls he still sports. (He is not, he admits, much bigger now.) The son of a guitar hobbyist and a high-school flautist, DiGesu had started as a singer at a School of Rock on the Upper West Side before gravitating toward bass, because it seemed simple enough to remain fun. Instant friends with Green, DiGesu visited the basement, too.
Geese—their name derived from Green’s nickname, Goose—became their weekend passion. They played some sports (Bassin learned to shoot threes from the wing, so his basketball coach stopped putting him at center) and a lot of Wii Sports (about which they give me a spirited primer), but Geese was the real enthusiasm. “We had the Friday after school, and then we would do stuff on Saturday. We’d sleep over Saturday and leave on Sunday, because it was homework day,” DiGesu says of that moment, just less than a decade ago now. “We only had those 24 hours, basically, after school, to work.”
By the time they all turned 16, they had recorded A Beautiful Memory, an audacious and aggressive 11-track record that crosshatched Interpol and MGMT, spoken-word post-punk and outsized Muse dynamics. No one in their schools thought it was cool. Winter remembers one kid telling him that he’d heard their song, “Always,” on Bandcamp. Excited, Winter asked what he thought: “What’d I think? The intro is fucking two minutes long.”
“I always said it was very embarrassing to be in a band until it wasn’t anymore, you know?” Bassin says. “It was pretty much the classic, ‘Oh, you guys are in a band together? That’s gay.’”
Before high school ended, they wanted to try for a second record. Winter had been frustrated by how tedious the first album had been, how absolute democracy within the band made the work move so slowly. It had taken a year, he says, to finish four or five songs. He started spending each week between the sessions writing another number, building out the parts as closely as possible to how he imagined them. A friend DiGesu had met at School of Rock, Foster Hudson, had finally joined the band as a second guitarist after initially declining an invite. Winter could now write for two guitars. By the time high school was done, they’d made their second album, Projector.
It was darker and more shambolic, chaotically bouncing down some of the same alleyways as The Strokes. They put it on Soundcloud, and Winter built a Google Doc for all the labels he emailed, too, asking for any kind of help. They lived in a city where the music industry surrounded them, but they were private-school kids without a scene. They didn’t know how to access it.
Maybe Willie Upbin did? In late March 2020, Upbin was about to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania and take a job as an A&R scout at Atlantic Records. He was a collegiate fencer who had played music and loved the idea of the industry. He stumbled upon Geese’s Soundcloud page and was blown away. He sent the record to an attorney who said they could get a deal immediately.
Upbin shot Geese an Instagram message and told them he wanted to work together. They had a conference call. Upbin told them he’d been sending Projector to labels and that places like Sub Pop were already interested. “They were so naïve,” says Upbin. “They were kids who said, ‘This is sick.’”
On April 13, 2020, Upbin and Geese held a Zoom meeting with Terrible Records. It was Bassin’s 18th birthday. His mom, Annie, took notes during the call. Sub Pop followed, as did 4AD. They had, Upbin remembers, played maybe five shows.
“I probably had the best April 2020 of anyone on Earth,” says Winter. “When they were like ‘Sub Pop wants to offer you a record deal,’ I screamed. I’ve never screamed in my life like that, before or since. My parents rushed into my bedroom, thinking I had hung myself or something.”

The song has not yet finished playing through the studio speakers before Winter has another idea. “What was that sitar drone thing? That box?” he asks, squaring his hands into a rectangle. “I wonder if that would sound good over this—like, the whole thing.”
Kenny Blume, née Beats, spins around in his green office chair and laughs. “Oh, yeah, we can try that,” he says. He wheels across the black-and-white tile of his control room and points to a beige piece of plastic perched high on a shelf. A studio assistant, Tovi, grabs it and spins it around with the kind of curiosity reserved for a scientist who has just found a new species. “How do we record this?” he asks hesitantly, adjusting his glasses.
When I left Geese’s rental this morning, all four members, none of whom have ever had a driver’s license, piled into a large white Lyft and headed 20 minutes toward the studio. The night before, they’d started recording a tune called “Here My Angels Come,” a moping and beautiful ballad about wobbling on the threshold of suffering and salvation. It was the fourth time they’d attempted to capture it, after trying and failing three times during the sessions for Getting Killed. It sounded too much like Suicide, Winter admits, so they wanted to get the rhythm right this time. Bassin cut the slow, stumbling drums last night, like a death march inside of a dream, and Green added some smoldering electric guitar. DiGesu supplied his strutting bassline this morning, Green a single guitar chord at the close.
But since noon, Winter has mostly sat wedged among a half-dozen different keyboards in a live room, trying to figure out how he is actually supposed to play the thing. Bassin and DiGesu watch the New York Mets in another room (DiGesu and his mom finally bought season tickets this year), while Green naps on a bed tucked beside the bathroom.
Winter plays for a minute or so at a time on a Yamaha CP-70, the electric piano D’Angelo re-popularized many years ago, and then stops. Standing behind Blume, engineer Daniel McNeill rewinds the tape spooling through a towering Ampeg machine and nods for Winter to start again. After an hour of this, Winter sighs. “Does anyone have a pen?” he asks through his microphone. I toss him a spare, and he spends the next few minutes sketching out a new structure on pieces of Putnam Hill stationery, crossing out old ideas and patterns. “Not so intense dynamically,” he writes on the bottom of one page.
“He doesn’t like it,” Blume whispers to me. “He doesn’t have his part figured out yet. Once he knows what he wants to do, it’s one or two takes. The only time he ever redoes takes is because he doesn’t know what it is yet.”
He’s right. Only a few minutes after Winter puts the pen down and turns back to the keys, he has the structure and the take. He moves his chair to a red Nord keyboard and sets it up to sound like a celesta, a piano lookalike where keys strike metal rods that suggest an army of tiny bells. You have absolutely heard it in The Nutcracker. Winter plays a few notes and chuckles. “We’ll see, we’ll see,” he says. “It’s either going to sound beautiful or … like The Nutcracker.” Blume assures him that the tape takes the edge off: “It’s not as nutty as last time.” They both laugh.
Momentum is building now, and the rest of the band slowly drifts into the control room. DiGesu shuffles in and nods along to the rhythm section, the keyboards framing the beat with a soft neon glow. Green curls onto a couch and tells me about a dream she just had where she was arrested for starting a fight with Jeff Bezos. Her work is finished until this song is done, so she’s ready for the next one. “Being in bed for an extended period of time while other people are being creative around you and you can hear it is a very good way to become wildly depressed very quickly,” she says, doodling friendly monsters on a Putnam Hill notepad of her own.
Bassin arrives, coughing a little from the bong hit he just took in the kitchen and peeling off his sunglasses. He, Winter, and Blume sort through snare drums and triangles, trying to find the sounds they want for one more layer of percussion. As the tape whirrs back to life, Winter and Bassin stare at one another from across a microphone, lightly tapping the snares with brushes. When Blume tells Bassin to find the pocket, the drummer chuckles and says, “I am the pocket.” They try again. He later admits he might have been looking over Winter’s shoulder at the Mets game still conveniently playing on the television in the other room.
Winter wonders if the song is actually done. But he wants to try a little guitar. He sits in the control room between me and Blume, who suggests he retune and try it with an open string. Winter worries that the jarring licks sound too much like Television, particularly “Guiding Light.” When he says they’re one of three bands Geese is content to rip off, Blume warns him not to mention the others in front of a journalist, citing Robin Thicke’s legal troubles with Marvin Gaye’s estate and the copyright lines that lawsuit blurred. When I tell Winter about the first time I talked to Tom Verlaine, he stops playing and stares at me. He wants to know everything. He was funny and candid, I say. His eyes brighten: “I fucking knew it.”
He tries the guitar one more time and asks to hear the song again. He likes it but wonders aloud if it should sound more like Journey’s “Faithfully.” And then he remembers to ask Blume about that “sitar drone box” he’s seen. It’s a little Indian drum machine Blume bought in Mumbai years ago but has rarely used on records. You can sync the rhythm of a tabla with the purr of a tanpura, and Winter thinks it could be the missing piece—not Journey, exactly, but an unexpected texture.
He hovers above it as the song plays in his headphones, changing the key at a precise moment only he seems to hear. In the other room, Green stands behind Blume, telling him when to fade it in and out of the track. “That’s pretty good,” Winter says, emerging from the live room with a slight smile. “It doesn’t even sound corny.”
Blume offers him a wide grin and leaves the control room. He walks to a dry-erase board in an alcove near the bed. Green has decorated it with assorted creatures, like a woman with wings for ears and geese heads for hands. (Ms. GeesebandNYC, she’s called.) Blume picks up a marker. He puts a check beside “Here My Angels Come,” beneath a column that reads “Dubs.” It is day six, and only four songs remain with no checkmarks. Is this too easy?
It’s time to start recording “Lyin.” Oh, yeah: It still needs to be written.

When Jake Lafferty arrived at the Queens recording studio Diamond Mine in January 2022, they did not know what to expect from the next four days.
Before the pandemic, Lafferty had worked as a de facto tour manager for international punk bands trying to make it across the States. After a stint delivering weed in New York, Lafferty was looking to get back on the road when a friend from Black Midi’s entourage asked them if they would be willing to drive five New York kids from a band called Geese to Detroit. The members were all almost 20, but no one in the band had a license.
“It seemed like a bunch of children getting into a shitty van with me,” Lafferty tells me, referring to the beige Ford E-150 they borrowed from their friend Alex for the trip. “But then we got to Detroit. They started with ‘2122,’ which hadn’t even been recorded yet. That immediate hit of Cam singing? I was blown off my ass.”
To be fair, Geese had played live. There were a few shows before the pandemic, and they actually played during the pandemic to an empty club, making videos to send to the labels that were offering them deals. And after Partisan Records released Projector late in 2021—“You are the best of the worst,” Winter told Partisan cofounder Tim Putnam when asked about the decision—they’d done a sample of American festivals and a short European run, where they all finally contracted Covid.
But now Lafferty was driving Geese to their first-ever back-to-back-to-back American shows, three months after they released their debut and three weeks into sessions for their second album. They had already been profiled in The New York Times, but they’d yet to see the States from a van’s window.
“The shows, more than anything, felt like an unwelcome interruption from recording. We had been living the dream in the studio, and we were miffed,” Winter tells me, remembering that the best part might have been discovering Malört. “We didn’t have anything to compare it to, really, but it didn’t feel good to play at not very many people in the intense cold winter in Pittsburgh.”
Geese had unwittingly reverse-engineered the process of being indie rock upstarts, signing a deal with a prominent label before they’d tested their mettle live. Before Upbin contacted them in March 2020, after all, they planned to graduate from high school, break up, and mostly head off to college. Winter was bound for Boston University, hoping to make enough money that he could retire early and then become a musician. DiGesu was going to Boston, too, to study music at Berklee, although his real ambition was to find and join a band he loved and then drop out. Green intended to do studio art at Oberlin, while Bassin was OK with being rejected by the music production program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, since he planned on moving to Europe to play in a friend’s band, anyway.
They’d delayed all that after they signed a deal. Geese almost immediately started working on new material. “We had Trojan Horsed our way into a record label. We were like, ‘We got ’em. We tricked them. Now we can do whatever the fuck we want,” Winter remembers with an unabashed Cheshire grin. “It was amazing. It was the feeling of your whole life spreading out in front of you. We just knew, from that point on, we didn’t give a fuck what happened.”
But living that axiom was harder than simply believing it. After Lafferty drove them back to New York, they continued working on their second album until they returned to the road for six more months, toggling between Europe and the States, clubs and festivals. Winter calls it one of the worst experiences of his life, swinging between sell-outs and “ghost shows,” all marred by in-ear click tracks that people they assumed knew better told them they had to use.
It soon became apparent that touring was not for Hudson, either. “Our former guitarist had to drop out less than halfway through. He didn’t quit then and there, but he went home,” Winter says. “We felt like total frauds.”
Learning to tour wasn’t the only issue. Projector was mostly finished when Geese signed their record deal, needing only a final mix by producer Dan Carey. It was a relatively low-risk investment for a label. But Geese had some momentum now, and when it came time to make 3D Country, they’d brought another marquee British producer, James Ford, to the States for a month. He was a big deal, having made music with Arctic Monkeys, Gorillaz, and Florence + the Machine. These kids who weren’t quite drinking age blew him away. After that brief tour, for instance, the band and Ford went to a different studio for overdubs, including a session with some seasoned background vocalists. Ford enjoys arranging such work, helping figure out how an artist’s grand idea fits into a rock song. He quickly realized his help was unnecessary.
“Cameron was telling all these amazing background singers what notes to sing and where and what feel. I just stepped back and let him go,” remembers Ford, smiling over Zoom from his own studio. “When the singers left, they were all like, ‘Wow, who is this guy?’ The bigger picture he has going on in his head is really impressive.”
Still, this wasn’t a cheap record to make, not some Bassin-family basement production. Partisan offered a mountain of notes about changes the band should consider before they would release it. “They made something so special,” remembers Partisan’s Tim Putnam, “but there was a lot of communication on that album, from recording to mixing to mastering.”
Winter puts it less lightly. “The whole point of the album was to indulge ourselves, and it was indulgent as hell,” he says, pointing to a minute-long drone at the end of that opening track, “2122,” that the label wanted trimmed to five seconds or less. “We considered saying fuck you, but we were told by everyone in our camp ‘You are not in a position to come to the table right now with your own opinions.’ They were right. We had no fans. I was so depressed.”
By the time 3D Country was released in June 2023, some 18 months after Lafferty scooped them from those first sessions at Diamond Mine, they had finally endured the real trials of being a young rock band—a label becoming an opinionated creative voice, tours that felt like hell, public indifference. And though they wouldn’t announce it for another six months, they all agreed that summer that Hudson would be best going to school, just like they’d all intended to do three years earlier. DiGesu and Green say his decision just meant they needed to work harder.
“I was sad I wouldn’t continue to play guitar with Foster on stage anymore. We had a good dynamic,” Green tells me one day during breakfast. “But it was motivating, because we didn’t really have a choice. We could warp under the pressure, or we could figure out a way to make this really good. I think we did.”

On December 16 of last year, Jake Lenderman asked his manager to get him Winter’s phone number.
Lenderman had never paid much mind to Geese, maybe once ignoring an Instagram message about playing some shows together, but earlier that month, a trusted songwriter friend had sent him a few of their songs and told him to give them a try. “He said, ‘You’re going to hate these on first listen,’” Lenderman remembers, laughing. “And he also said, ‘The singer is releasing a solo album tomorrow.’”
The next morning, while boarding a flight home, Lenderman downloaded the aforementioned album and listened to Winter’s solo debut, Heavy Metal. Every day for the next month, he spun it at least twice. At the exact time his own album, Manning Fireworks, was crowning year-end lists, one of his 2024 favorites had arrived late, to almost zero fanfare. So he sent Winter a mid-December text telling him just how much he loved Heavy Metal, then asked his girlfriend, Water From Your Eyes singer Rachel Brown, to invite Winter to a New Year’s Eve party in New York. When they met, Lenderman and Winter talked about jam bands, and how Phish’s Trey Anastasio liked both their music, but Lenderman mostly tried not to creep him out as he told him of his fandom.
“It shares something with classic song-form and aesthetics and shit, but there’s another layer of understanding and irreverence there,” Lenderman says, pointing to how cutting, funny, and sad the record’s opener, “The Rolling Stones,” is. “I was inspired by how uncompromising it felt.”
On a hot Friday afternoon in Raleigh, North Carolina, Winter and I stand outside of a hot dog restaurant, waiting for a cab. In a few hours, Geese will open for My Morning Jacket at the Hopscotch Music Festival downtown, so the band woke up early to rehearse in a rented practice room, not only for the night’s show but also for a brief upcoming European run and an appearance on Nigel Godrich’s From the Basement. When I tell him I saw Lenderman two days ago and that he said hey, Winter stares at me, blinks in the bright sun, and smiles. “Jake was one of the first people to tell me he liked my album,” he says. “That meant so much to me.”
Winter first knew he wanted to make a solo album when he was 18, just as Geese were finishing Projector. In truth, he’d made his own music all along, playing his solo songs for his father since he was a kid. But when Geese signed to Partisan, the band took care to stipulate that Winter could remain a free agent, that he could make music outside of the band for anyone. He just didn’t expect it to be so goddamn hard.
“The solo record was just, like, a complete random smattering of nothings forced into song form over the course of a year, basically,” he says very softly, like the memory is a sleeping enemy he doesn’t want to wake. “That was a true nightmare. I came in with literally nothing. It’s a miracle it turned into an album at all.”
By July 2023, Geese had already become a wild and sometimes rough ride: those cursed Projector shows, the resulting loss of Hudson, the extended bickering about 3D Country before its eventual June release. He wanted to keep working, but he knew that another Geese record didn’t make sense at the moment. And the few song ideas he actually liked didn’t suit a band, anyway. “Part of the reason I had to do a solo record was I didn’t see any way to make what I wanted to make without being selfish,” he explains. “If you’re writing for a band, everyone’s got to be built in, ideally. I didn’t want to subject the band to a record with, like, two songs that have drums.”
So in late July, rather than immediately hit the road to support 3D Country, Winter took the bus two hours north to Tuxedo Park, New York, a gated lakeside community built by a prior generation of American oligarchs. That’s where drummer and producer Loren Humphrey—who had worked with Ford on 3D Country and had, likewise, been astonished at the band’s musicality and Winter’s focus—had a house and a studio with a 16-track tape machine. “The other day I asked Cameron why he asked me to work on Heavy Metal,” Humphrey tells me over the phone from a family vacation in France. “He said it was because I was the only engineer he knew.”
Microphones and amplifiers lined threadbare oriental rugs that stretched across old pine floors; the electrical cables snaked across the house to a little control room crowded with recording equipment downstairs. Winter mostly lived there for three weeks, recording the vague notions he already had for songs and then, as Humphrey puts it, “jamming, filling up 16 tracks, dumping that, and arranging it later.” (Before he arrived in Tuxedo Park, Winter had completely written a few tracks, like “Drinking Age” and “Vines.”)
Their only preordained axiom was that, as with a classic folk record, vocals should remain front and center, always near the spotlight no matter what happened around them. “I had my heroes I wanted to bite a piece off of,” Winter says, mentioning his then-nascent Dylan fascination, Leonard Cohen, and Buckleys Tim and Jeff. “And I had the way I was playing piano—more stompy and weird. That was basically it.”
He spent a lot of time with a short-scale red piano, covered in gold and blue nihonga drawings of bridges, temples, and mountains. Long ago, it belonged to comedian and “Frosty the Snowman” singer Jimmy Durante; Humphrey inherited it from his great aunt, who had worked as Durante’s cook. As he slowly built the sounds they’d captured into something resembling songs with shapes, Winter would leave space for the lyrics and melodies he was still writing. Back in Brooklyn, Humphrey lugged a bunch of recording equipment up the stairs to Winter’s childhood bedroom, where he did vocal take after take, often trying a new persona with each pass.
“It seemed like he was trying to beat himself down, to do so many vocal takes that eventually the thing it’s supposed to be just reveals itself because you’re so sick of it,” Humphrey says. “It’s like your unconscious mind is going to show you what the truth is.”
Winter had expected the album to take a few weeks, maybe a few months. But he kept returning to Humphrey’s home and the ad hoc vocal booth of his childhood bedroom between Geese runs. He spent an entire week recording with Humphrey in January 2024, then large chunks of March and April mixing it with him. A year had nearly passed.
“He worked his ass off recording Heavy Metal,” his dad, Stewart, tells me via text. “I once descended the stairs past midnight, expecting to find a home intruder and instead found Cameron with a soldering iron, hunched over a piece of gear, discussing vocal chains on speakerphone with a thickly Hungarian-accented interlocutor. He didn’t even look at me.”
Early feedback from the label, management, and his dad was bad, even before Humphrey and Winter could finish Heavy Metal. They would take daily constitutionals up a hill near Humphrey’s house, and Winter went into a panic during one of them, worried that his label would hate the music so much they’d never let him make a record again. “I’m like, ‘Listen, dude, you’re 21, and you’ve already released more records than most people,’” says Humphrey, tickled by the memory. “I told him it didn’t matter, that he had so much potential.”
It got much worse. That May, Geese were the second act on a three-band arena bill headlined by Zeppelin cosplayers Greta Van Fleet. The schedule was strict, as they chased tour buses from city to city, and the large audiences were largely apathetic. Greta Van Fleet did gift them a $200 bottle of tequila; the band would circle through the Taco Bell drive-thru to mix it with Baja Blast.
As Geese faced their long odds every night, Winter was having tense discussions in the van with Upbin, his manager, and Putnam from Partisan about whether or not it made career sense to release Heavy Metal at all. There was a strong sense that the record would crater, leaving a sensitive kid whose career hitherto seemed like one brilliant accident deflated. Two of the songs neared the 10-minute mark and needed editing, they said. Upbin wanted a weepy number called “Try As I May” excised and another, “Love Takes Miles,” re-recorded to get to its possible pop essence. (To be fair, “Love Takes Miles” has been streamed seven million times on Spotify and has become something of a TikTok hit, soundtracking videos of kittens and teddy bears and prompting lots of acoustic covers. Blume says Winter once told him, “I fucking hate that song.”) They wanted something other than a song called “Crap City” at album’s end. He’d told Humphrey he wanted the vocals to feel awkward and uncomfortable, and, well, that seemed to be the effect of the album writ large.
“It was a tough tour and a humbling month, because I was not having fun in the music industry, as it were,” Winter admits. “I didn’t think the album was going to come out, so I was just looney, so upset, breaking shit onstage for no reason, being a pain in the ass to the rest of the band.”
Winter made some concessions with the first round of notes but refused them all the second time around. Winter warned Upbin to never take the label’s side again. This was the record, he insisted, he needed to release. His father, long a critical if enthusiastic audience, warned him that making art on his own terms was one thing, but dealing with the consequences was another. “I thought it was beautiful, but I couldn’t help but hear it as a parent who is invested in his future,” his dad admits. “I wanted to prepare him for the possibility that it wouldn’t be understood to the extent he seemed to think it ought to be.”
For Winter, that was not the point. “I remember being like, ‘Do you not like it?’ And people would say, ‘No, we really like it, but you can’t put this out,’” Winter says, his mouth twisted into something between a smile and a sneer. “That made no fucking sense. I thought, ‘You guys are stupid if that’s what you’re thinking. You guys are so fucking down the rabbit hole of industry misery if you like it but don’t want to put it out. You could be doing a job that pays more in a different industry. Get out.’”
If it isn’t clear by now, Winter is wildly honest, despite years of playful misdirection in the press and, according to his dad, a childhood tendency to lie. That honesty is the feeling I get every single time I hear Heavy Metal, too, the sense that makes the songs so magnetic. For 44 minutes, Winter wrestles with almost all of life’s big questions, teetering on the edge of oblivion that they so often create. He wrestles with stupidity and self-delusion, with faith and doubt, with the chemicals that fuel or break us and the rules that lock us into false senses of order. Heavy Metal seems like his attempt, as he puts it in one rapturous moment, to “love whatever kicks me hardest in the mouth.”
Winter was in love as he finished Heavy Metal, as he told the musician Andy Frasco on a podcast days before its release, but he tells me that phase has since ended. “For being 23,” his dad says, “he has fallen madly in love a great many times and has consequently had his heart broken in enough ways to sustain him for another five or six albums’ worth of lyrics, probably.” Heavy Metal is an ouroboros, then, of hope and despair, rendered in a voice that seems to care less about singing than reaching by whatever means necessary what Humphrey calls “the truth.”
“I’ve been in love with people I don’t see anymore, and there is an expectation you take your love back from them, take back your power,” Winter says slowly in the hot dog restaurant. He sips his Modelo as Creedence Clearwater Revival pounds out of the speakers like some ludicrous joke. He pauses for a long time.
“If you love a bunch of people who you are away from all the time, life is too fucking painful,” he finally continues. “Having too much of your love out there in the world kills you. There’s always more to say on the subject, pleasure and pain to be dredged up.”
On January 11, more than a month after Heavy Metal was released, Pitchfork published a rave review, calling it “a project of catharsis that never comes across like an exercise in vanity, an outpouring of material as necessary to its creator as it is compelling to experience.” Upbin was on a ski lift in California when he heard the news, and he called Winter to tell him. “I fucking knew it,” Winter chided. Upbin admitted he’d been wrong. He tells me now that he should have fought for a better release date when the label slotted it for December 6, essentially meaning it would be stillborn.
“I can’t say it was a mistake, because it’s part of the lore now,” Upbin says. “But it made me trust him more, and it made me realize what my job is—to step in when I think something is going to hurt them. Hindering their art and process is not my job, or being a ‘notes giver.’ I only do it now when he asks.”
In late May, Winter announced four solo shows in early December, like a first birthday party for Heavy Metal. The Carnegie Hall show sold out almost instantly. When he plays there, he will join an elite pantheon of songwriters who played there before they turned 25. Dylan was 20; Joan Baez, 21; James Taylor, Tim Buckley, and Laura Nyro, all 22. Winter will still be three months shy of 24.

No one in Geese quite knew what to make of Kenny Beats, back before Winter convinced him once and for all just to be Kenny Blume.
In the summer of 2024, Blume had gone to see his old friends in King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard for two nights at Forest Hills Stadium. He missed the opening act, but he admired the gumption of their merchandise—namely, a T-shirt that read Geese inside the Oasis logo, above a picture of the Beatles. Was that even legal? He asked a friend about Geese’s deal. “They’re just these smartass kids from Brooklyn,” he said.
The smartass beatmaker from Connecticut was intrigued enough to see them on night two, then to download 3D Country, then to fall steadily for the record’s busted Ween-meets-Queen outlandishness. When he saw Geese in Los Angeles a few weeks later, he spied other hotshot producers in the room and decided the time probably wasn’t right to court them. He couldn’t help himself. “I don’t know what came over me,” he tells me. “But I knew I couldn’t work with anybody but these guys. I just had to make music with these kids.”
Blume emailed managers, labels, and friends, trying to set up a meeting with Geese. He heard they already had time booked in January with a famous peer, but he didn’t care. So in October, when they were both playing Austin City Limits on the same day, he barged into their tent, took a deep bong rip, and did something he does very, very well: started talking. The bong belonged to Bassin and DiGesu, so they paid attention. Green was more circumspect, sizing him up from across the tent. Winter, meanwhile, sat with his feet on a chair, his head tucked so far between his knees that he never made eye contact.
“I don’t know why I was confident enough to say the word ‘horny,’ but I said, ‘I’m horny for mistakes,’” Blume says, flashing his infectious smile. “And then Cameron looked at me, through me, like I said the fucking secret code word to a speakeasy.”
Winter liked the idea of capturing his imperfect band and his odd voice with someone who was also horny for mistakes. “Astral Weeks is a good example. Van Morrison hates that album, partially because he’s a dick and he’s stupid,” Winter says with a little glint in his eyes. “But also because he only hears the mistakes, you know? He doesn’t have it in his brain to hear that the mistakes are the best thing he ever did.”
A week later, Winter asked Blume for a video of Putnam Hill, the new studio he’d just built in Los Angeles. As Kenny Beats, Blume had become famous not only as a go-to producer for the likes of Vince Staples and Denzel Curry but also as an animated YouTube star able to work in Ableton at warp speed. But his career had become more about the demands of content creation than making exciting new music, and he wanted to get back to that place with Putnam Hill. He wanted to work with a rock band, too. When Winter told him that Geese would try his new room for four days in November 2024, he rejoiced. It did not go as planned.
“My only reference for what Geese was doing was 3D Country. They came in, started demoing things, and it was batshit crazy,” Blume says. He couldn’t discern the structures, like where a verse may stop and a chorus may start, or where Winter’s vocals might eventually fit into the music. “I was like, ‘What the fuck are these songs?’ I wasn’t not into them, but I didn’t have a reference for where Cameron’s songwriting had gone in a couple of years.”
During those four days, Blume saw Green grinning as she strolled down the hallway. “It’s so good,” she said. He asked what “it” meant, and she said she’d finally heard Winter’s entire solo album. A week later, Blume saw the deadpan video for “$0” and became an instant evangelist, texting the link to anyone who might listen. What’s more, the confusing work they had just done suddenly computed. “It was,” he says, “like a perfect Lego piece.”
By the time Geese returned to Los Angeles in January, just as ash from the city’s wildfires started to scatter across Putnam Hill, Blume was a true disciple. His father was undergoing chemotherapy, and his life was in disarray. But he vowed to work as many hours and weeks as necessary to make the record Geese imagined. They did 14 hours a day, often straight through lunch, and he would then drive them home just before midnight. They had hoped to make a record in two weeks, but after two weeks, they seemed to have gotten almost nowhere.
“The way the songs develop a lot of the time is very slow. They sound like shit at the beginning, and that’s how it’s been with everything I’ve ever done—frustration, frustration, frustration,” Winter remembers. “Kenny was, like, calling his business partners, panicking, because everything was going so horribly wrong. I wasn’t panicking. This was about par for the course.”
Indeed, for two weeks, Blume was certain that his first impression of Winter back at ACL had been right—the singer hated him. The producer traded casual jokes with the rest of the band, but his banter with Winter was a barrage of epithets and brutal roasts. Winter had nothing nice to say about the space, the sessions, the songs, or the performances. But then they recorded “Islands of Men,” a swerving guitar song that finds a long-hidden lacuna between dub and post-punk, between Talking Heads and Liars, then erupts into a celestial triumph during its last minute. Exhausted from two weeks of recording with no break, Winter sank deep into a studio couch as he listened to the playback, his 6’3” frame spilling onto the floor.
“He says, ‘It almost sounds like a song,’” Blume remembers. “I was ecstatic. That was the best mediocre review I’d ever gotten.”
Blume and Winter started to submit to one another. Winter admits how fed up he first got with all the bass and drums takes Blume made Bassin and DiGesu do, as if he just couldn’t let the notion of Kenny Beats go. But he slowly realized that Blume was right—the tighter the rhythmic core of a song was, the more weirdness it could withstand, the more chances he could take with it. “He has a lot more patience than I did,” Winter says. “All I want to do is get to the next thing as fast as possible. I scarcely ever did two takes of anything in my entire life, until Kenny.”
And one morning, on a day when Blume’s dad was scheduled for more chemo, Winter arrived at the studio much earlier than expected. Blume was working on “Husbands,” a fistfight of a tune about Sisyphus and mortality and suffering and endless waves of doubt. He was crying, as he’d secretly done to so many of Winter’s songs. When Winter walked in, Blume wiped his face and apologized. Winter said he was sorry about his dad.
“I told him I was ready to work,” Blume remembers, “but he said, ‘You know, it’s so weird when I see people cry to these songs. I wrote them about shit in my life, but sometimes they don’t even make me cry.’”
Blume thought again about “Drinking Age”—from Heavy Metal, a wrecking ball of a song about stumbling drunkenly into a future version of yourself and hating what you see there—and how Winter had once told him that devastating tune was the first time he’d ever taken his own lyrics seriously and that he’d written it at one of the saddest points in his life. That song had felt to Blume like a page pulled from the story of his own life. “To think that these are the first lyrics he ever cared about: What the fuck are you going to sound like when you’ve cared for 10 years and have more life experience than a 23-year-old?” Blume, 34, continues. “He knows how to say something that feels the same and different to every one of us, and he doesn’t even understand it yet. That’s what puts him in the pantheon.”
The first full album made at Putnam Hill, Getting Killed is, at times, deliriously savage and painfully beautiful. “Half Real” is an ageless anthem of love and worry, Winter fending off the world’s creeping suspicions in order to try and covet something sacred for at least a little bit longer; opener “Trinidad” is an attempt to sabotage it all, its maniacal chorus—“There’s a bomb in my car”—only a symptom of the narrator’s turmoil. End to end, it is mercilessly efficient, every element and idea designed to cut to the quick. Where 3D Country was indulgent on purpose, Getting Killed booby-traps bona fide rock songs with barbed guitars, ballistic rhythms, and gnarled textures.
And if Winter didn’t agonize over Geese’s lyrics in the past, that lesson of Heavy Metal is clear here. No words are wasted, no sentiments hollow. “I should burn in hell/I should burn in hell,” he sings in a forlorn drift at the start of “Taxes,” the drums dancing around him as if in morbid celebration. “But I don’t deserve this/Nobody deserves this.” It is a perfect gambit that frames so much of an album that is, indeed, about “getting killed by a pretty good life”—about suffering through joy, about enjoying the suffering. And for the first time on a Geese album, it sounds less like Winter is singing and more like he’s unburdening himself of some great and formerly necessary weight. It is riveting, compulsive, real, and new.
I ask Winter if he likes the way he sings on Getting Killed. He chuckles and nods. “I guess? I like it insofar as I’m doing exactly what I want,” he says. “I just like voices where you can hear the person. Next to character, pitch and everything else is secondary. I like voices that sound like, you know, somebody.”
When Geese finally turned in Getting Killed to Partisan, the obvious evolution stunned Putnam. It felt not just like a follow-up to 3D Country but also the next step after Heavy Metal. “If Heavy Metal isn’t received in the way it was, is Getting Killed made in the same way? Do the vocals keep evolving?” Putnam asks me rhetorically. “That’s why I’m so grateful the reception has been what it is—the acceptance of a truly young, brilliant artist, a mind that’s getting nurtured by an entire community.”
Unlike 3D Country or Heavy Metal, Putnam had only two notes for Getting Killed. There was a glitch in the sound and a shift in the lyrics. “I made the technical change, but I’m not touching the lyrics,” Winter replied. “You’re shooting 50%.”

Early on Sunday afternoon, a few hours after Winter and I finally leave the Silver Lake coffee shop, I return to Blume’s studio, Putnam Hill.
Before my arrival yesterday, Winter had floated the idea of starting a fight with someone, maybe Blume himself. He wanted to make the session so uncomfortable that I would at least think about leaving. It was a test to see if I could hang. (Winter later tells me this is not true but then admits, OK, maybe it is.) He decided not to do it, but, as it turned out, he didn’t need to fake a fight, after all. Late in the evening, as Bassin built the drum track for “Lyin,” Blume offered a suggestion for the groove, thinking it would sound better with the accent shifted. Winter refused, and it became a whole thing.
“Kenny’s one of the smartest people I know, so he’s good at arguing even when he’s wrong—a cutting wit, too,” says Winter, laughing. He worries that Blume will remind him, again, how little he’s getting paid to shepherd Geese’s records, that making Getting Killed over two months rather than two weeks cost him money. “I personally don’t give a shit. I love the guy, but I can’t think about it like that. I don’t care if you’re doing this for $5, Kenny. I still want my groove.”
Bassin eventually broke the tie, siding with his bandmate. But soon after we talked, Winter headed over early to clear the air with Blume and get back to the song. I don’t speak to either of them that afternoon, as they huddle over studio gear, debate resolved and focus restored. But Bassin and DiGesu are free until the next song begins, so I pull them into the studio’s sunny little courtyard to talk about their life with Geese. When Green walks by on the other side of the glass, DiGesu follows her with his eyes and clears his throat.
“I could cry thinking about how much I respect every single one of my friends,” he says, pulling his hat closer over his curls. “Like Cameron having his outlet and doing it against whatever everyone else was saying? And Emily, coming out to us and showing us herself.”
When Green was 12, she knew she wasn’t a boy, that she’d been born in the wrong body. But she spent all of high school and the first year of the band’s professional existence—that is, after signing to Partisan—kind of doubting her insight. “I second-guess myself in music, and I second-guess myself in the rest of life, too,” she tells me. “I am just always some modicum of uncomfortable in, like, the skin that’s on my body.”
But in 2021, down in Bassin’s basement, she finally decided it was time to begin being honest with herself and the world. She told DiGesu and Upbin she wasn’t a guy, and Bassin overheard the revelation in the distance. “‘Wait, who’s not a guy?’” Green remembers him saying from across the room. She answered, and he paused. “‘Oh. Ooooh. That makes sense,’” she recalls. “I was really bad at being a boy, you know?”
For two years, Green used they/them pronouns, which she saw as a stepping stone on the path toward emerging as a woman. Though she was a lifelong New Yorker, she had no trans friends, no role models for what those next steps might actually look like. When Geese played South by Southwest in 2022, though, she met Olive Faber, the drummer in Sunflower Bean and a trans woman. Faber introduced Green to other friends, and her world began to open. “The first time we hung out, it must have been terribly unpleasant. It was like I was interviewing her the whole time,” remembers Green. “I was so damn starved.”
When Green first started presenting as a woman onstage, she strangely didn’t feel nervous. Through those first few tough Geese tours, she realized the stage was their space, at least for an hour every night. She could be whoever she wanted to be, whoever she actually was. She only regrets not realizing sooner that women didn’t have to wear skirts onstage, that women can wear jeans and T-shirts, too. She and Faber have since started a band of their own, Star’s Revenge, a project that flows directly from the new ways she’s started to see herself.
While making Getting Killed, for instance, Blume noticed that Green kept questioning her own guitar parts, that her trial-and-error was less like Winter’s exploration of possibility than an interrogation of her own self-worth. He pulled her aside and admitted that he was exactly the same way, that he had the same instinct to question every move he made. “I told her, ‘I’m your buddy on the other side of the window. What anyone else says in here doesn’t mean a fucking thing,’” Blume says. “We both understand the OCD psychopath in each other, and that’s my girl forever.”
She glows when I tell her that Blume said this. She’d been deeply unsure about the mammoth producer with the spiderweb tattoos and the Glock shirts when they met, but not anymore. Her playing on Getting Killed is radiant and cutting, any sense of second-guessing now gone. “I am a more confident, less timid person now,” Green tells me, less of that moment specifically than simply becoming who she was meant to be. “I stand a bit taller next to my bandmates, even if we’re all still the same people.”
In their rush of albums and in their dazzlingly fast rise from a good band to, on Getting Killed, an astounding one, it can get lost just how young the members of Geese remain. They were the only kids in their elite high schools to forego college, opting to get their education this way, at least for now. They are growing up, on stage and on tape. They are not only becoming a band but adults in their early 20s, too.
When I ask Sam Revaz, Geese’s touring keyboardist, about this evolution late one night, he grins and sighs. Revaz is 28, five years older than the other members of Geese. He finished his jazz piano performance degree at New York University the year before Geese had a record deal. Yes, they’ve encountered transphobia and racism in certain recesses of the country (Bassin’s mom is Chinese), but he says they’ve rolled over it like a speed bump, a piece of someone else’s past with which they needn’t be concerned in the present.
“With Emily transitioning, we were all a little scared at first, given the state of the country,” Revaz says. “But it’s been really clear to me from the jump that they’re not insecure about what other people think of them. And also, we have each other to lean on.”
Not long after DiGesu tells me how proud he is of Green and Winter, Blume returns to the whiteboard. He puts checkmarks beside “Lyin,” then signals to DiGesu through the window that he’s needed. It’s time to start the next song.

Music festivals can be hell.
Four hours after Winter and I leave the hot dog bar in a shared cab, Geese lug their gear piece by piece onto the fest’s main stage, which overlooks a long street with a distant view of North Carolina’s capitol. It is just past 6 p.m., so the Southern heat of early September hasn’t really broken. Sweat pours down everyone’s face. Revaz sits patiently at his keyboard while everyone else twirls around him like a cyclone, plugging in cables and checking headphones and stepping on pedals.
There’s no time for a soundcheck, but Geese play a bit of a song and seem satisfied enough. And then they notice a loud buzz from DiGesu’s bass amp. Stagehands they don’t know rush back and forth, shifting whatever they can grab to try and make the noise stop. DiGesu is about to find a new amp when Bassin rushes on stage. “Dom, let’s go,” he shouts over the house music. “It’s time to play.”
Geese rip straight into “Taxes,” its daunting opening lines—again, “I should burn in hell”—bouncing off the little city’s asphalt and concrete. Winter told me he was worried about the 90-minute set, how they would sustain interest for that long, but, as they ping-pong between 3D Country and Getting Killed and shoehorn a little Pink Floyd into “2122,” the whole thing feels riveting. Kids cling to the metal barricade up front and shake like it’s electrified, while millennials stand 100 feet or so back, their arms folded as they forego dinner. I get a few breathless texts from old friends in town: “Do you know this band?” “This is so good.” And, of course, “🪿 🪿 🪿 🪿.” After the set, I find Winter backstage, sliding his guitar into a case and curling the cord of his headphones. “It was so-so,” he volunteers. “It didn’t feel too long. It just felt weird.”
A few days later, Winter is fiddling with his guitar pickups in the band’s New York practice space. I ask why it felt weird and why, if the gig was only so-so, very few people seemed to leave. He noticed that, too. “That almost made me feel worse. They were sticking around out of loyalty more than anything, but I ain’t complaining,” he says. “We could have dialed it in better, but there was just no time. No one said it was that bad, so I think my fears were mostly internal, not totally justified. But I was frustrated.”
This is at the core of why I think Geese and Winter may be at the precipice of a historic run. There is no sense of self-satisfaction, no complacency in what they have done or what they now do, no acceptance of themselves as just another young rock band from New York. Before they could release Getting Killed, after all, they were recording its follow-up, finally trying to ace the quick-and-dirty approach they’d aimed to use all along. When I mention Winter’s backlog of 1,000 tunes to him, he calls himself “lazy” for not writing something every day right now. And when I remind him of something he told Blume that first day they met in Texas—“It’s not that hard to be a good band right now. Nobody’s trying.”—he doesn’t remember it, exactly, but he admits it seems like him.
“I don’t want to sound pompous, but there are a lot of musicians that hate making music, and they don’t realize they hate making music,” he says. “They’re like, ‘This is so hard. Why is it so hard?’ Because you don’t want to do it. Sometimes you’re walking down the street, and you feel like you could just make 40 albums. You have to keep that excitement going.”
When Heavy Metal entered its very protracted hype cycle early this year just as Geese began to make Getting Kill