Geese Gets What They've Been Begging For and/or Geese Gives What We've Been Begging For

Dear Abundant Reader, hello! The following is an essay about Geese, about how people feel about Geese, fandom and what people use music for. In other words: the usual self-agrandizing (albeit beautiful and important) horseshit. The following is NOT a review of the new Geese album. For that—a proper music review of Getting Killed, with references to both Gris-Gris and Cameron Winter's overt nod to Nick Cave—please subscribe to CREEM Magazine. Review shall be in December issue. Also, please read our thrilling profile of Geese, where our heroes tour with Greta Van Fleet, published a full year before the competition realized Geese's ineffable charms. Thank you. OK. Now you may continue. Thanks for being here. I think you're cool.

Geese is a young band from New York City. They are fronted by a singer who can sing so well that he resists it, who writes lyrics so ingenious and heartfelt that reasonable dummies think they’re bad, and who is tall. Geese is made up of Berklee-level musicians who play rock and roll music, infused with funk and latin rhymes, which is inventive enough, is historically minded to an almost absurd degree, and is miraculously free of both jam-band meandering and anything that anyone with short hair in 1977 would consider “punk.” The members of Geese are young enough that they were young when the band released its first EP in 2018 and now, seven years later, the core members of the group—singer Cameron Winter, guitarist Emily Green, bassist Dominic DiGesu, drummer Max Bassin—are still young. 

Born nine months after their respective parents met each other in the bathroom, and collectively signed right out of high school, Geese got a lot of attention with their, technically second (after a disavowed high school album) but first-for-a-label release, 2021’s Projector, a proto-indie sleaze revival tentpole which sounded like the sort of bravado-rock album that gets an appropriate amount of hype when made by young people in NYC. Two years later, Geese got less attention for 3D Country, which sounded like an Atlantean pterodactyl dressed like The Move-era Jeff Lynne getting to third base with a comet. Geese bounced back from this glorious but underperceived accomplishment through the unexpected—welcome but borderline inexplicable—smash success of Cameron Winter’s solo album, Heavy Metal, which sounded like what happens when a manic genius piano balladeer, hopped up on poetry and cough syrup, gets dumped by Rickie Lee Jones’ hat. Geese is now getting the most attention of their career for Getting Killed, which, depending on who you ask, sounds like either a bluesy Radiohead (for pussies), or like the future of Rock and Roll (if rock and roll having a future was something people might want). 

Those last two takes—reductionist and broadstroked to the point of edging as I may be depicting them—give a fairly accurate view of where the Haters and Stans of indie reddit, tik tok, critical consensus, and twitter are planting their Getting Killed flags. 

Getting Killed was recorded with Kenneth Blume, the Vince Staples collaborator who was known as “Kenny Beats” before reverse Ellis Island-ing his surname to befit his transition from hip hop production to a music more indigenous to his native land of Greenwich, Connecticut. According to a twelve page profile of Geese in Gentleman's Quarterly, Blume cemented the gig after telling the band that he was “horny for mistakes.” 

Concurrent to Blume earning the band’s trust, Cameron Winter’s solo album came out. Heavy Metal is an album heavy with both horniness and error. If Heavy Metal’s agnostics (not to be confused with “haters,” as this initial group of concerned doubters included both Winter’s record label and his dad) had been correct, the result might have been a humbling which resulted in a far more staid Geese album. But Heavy Metal was not a flop, not in terms of songcraft or sales. This too might have resulted in disaster. Historically speaking, there are few worse influences on a band’s artistic process than a lead singer who has been recently proven correct. 

In another era, with band more inclined to self-delusion and/or a producer less inclined to the rigorous classicism of artists like Staples or Freddie Gibbs, Blume and Winter’s horniness might have meant Geese would be allowed to go full self-destruction, taking the band’s barely sublimated talent for Stones-y anthemics and willfully counterintuitive anti-jamming into indulgent and depressing noisenik territories. Getting Killed might have been It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll as performed by Royal Trux, with some samples and cumbia beats thrown in for ill conceived busyness. Which might have pleased some of the people my age who currently dismiss Geese as lightweights, but probably wouldn’t have been as popular, or even good. Luckily, this did not happen. The songs on the album may go in strange directions, but they do not ever not go. For all of Cameron Winter’s stated insistence on an almost fetishized originality, there’s nothing so abrasive or superfluous on Getting Killed that it couldn’t work on a Curtis Mayfield soundtrack.   

Professional reviews have been almost exclusively positive. Yung regime Pitchfork gave the album 9 Goops on Ya Grinches out of 10 (with Sam Sodomsky even using the site’s vaunted “palpable," lest anyone doubt his ardor). The Needle Drop’s Anthony Fantano gave the album a “decent to strong eight” (I read the transcript). UPROXX’s Steven Hyden, one of the few critics to appreciate 3D Country’s grandeur, called Getting Killed the greatest album of 2025, adding that opening track “Trinidad” was the sound of living in America today. Not to be outdone—or just being consistent as an advocate of open borders—Welcome to Hell World’s Luke O’Neil wrote that Getting Killed reflected the madness of the whole world. Such sentiments were representative. Words like “important” and “necessary” were tossed around to an extent not seen since the mid- 'tens. Without completely ruling out mass nostalgia for the Noisey style guide, it’s safe to assume that the critics genuinely enjoyed listening to the new Geese album.

Even Rolling Stone Magazine—who, as far as I can tell from their barely usable website, didn’t review Getting Killed—still saw fit to cover the band in a profile. That RS spared even a single page for Geese coverage, on the same calendar year that a new Taylor Swift album was released, is a testament to the moment which Cameron Winter & Co. are having. 

Most people who don’t love Getting Killed don’t like the band no matter what. Typically because they find Winter’s voice—whether it be his bohunk yee-haw yowling on 3D Country or his current upskirt quavering—infuriating. While this aspect of Winter’s voice isn’t “intentional,” per se, neither is the singer unaware of what affect his voice might have. In the process of writing my profile of Geese, while spending time with the band at Gooski’s in Pittsburgh, I waxed adderall-rapturously to the band’s frontman about the timber of his voice on 3D Country. He interrupted my babble with a non-apology about how he was unlikely to ever revisit that sound. With a half grin, he told me that I may be bummed with what was coming. He was wrong about the second part—I’m a true blue fan—but he wasn’t lying. Whether his recent claims to having never heard Rufus Wainwright are accurate, or are instead a Greil Marcus-ian callback to Kyuss claiming to have never heard a note of Black Sabbath, is irrelevant and impossible to know. All the members of Geese are exceptional deadpan-artists and nothing is likely to change the upward trajectory of Winter’s plaintive warble. Discerning partisans to the hater side of the Getting Killed hill should feel free to switch out “Radiohead” for “Black Midi.”

Of people who have both heard of Geese, who give a shit one way or the other, and who are not entirely on board with Getting Killed, there are two other camps. For holding almost granular points of view which are predicated on very specific kinds of neurosis, the two camps share a lot of psychic and cultural territory (and probably some geographical real estate as well). 

The first camp is made up of those listeners who like Getting Killed very much, but who think 3D Country was one of the finest rock albums of the last decade and therefore have some concerns about a stylistic departure from that masterpiece getting all the attention. That camp is me, and anyone who’d like to tag along. It’s a barely defensible position to hold and I’d enjoy the company. This first camp’s tenets consist of: loving the band Geese, slightly preferring Cameron Winter singing like a cosmic Foghorn Leghorn over the high warbling authenticity he currently favors (but still digging the latter very much as well), and, when attending a free Geese performance in a park in Williamsburg, reminding oneself that young people are allowed to dress how they like, that the signifiers of the 1990s had little inherently moral significance, and that if anyone is to blame for the kids dressing like elderly mall walkers, it’s VICE Magazine for convincing the hipsterati that the Murder City Devils were corny but that Mac DeMarco’s style of billowing-fart-casual was a lookbook worth aspiring to. That last one might be a hard pill to swallow, especially while in the midst of Williamsburg dispensary-chic, but to ignore its core truth is to invite psychic bitterness.

The second camp, worst as people but all the more relatable for it, are those who have no strong opinion regarding any aspect of Geese’s catalog beyond the fact of Geese currently getting attention. Which they don’t like. Amongst my people—the aging hipsters of North America, for whom a life in the arts has not paid off in the exact ways we’d thought it would back when we were flannel flying teens in College Town, USA, dreaming of growing up, moving to the big city, and partying with the sort of debauched sophisticates who went out to clubs where members of Pussy Galore hung out—there is a small but vocal population for whom the success of Geese is causing distress. 

The specifics vary, and no musician with any dignity would ever publicly admit to fitting this particular bill but, within the boho-alt past there were people for whom the roadmap to Merge Records went off course, and amongst those people there are some for whom this passing over resulted in them growing into the kind of reactionary snob who will forever be dispositionally nasty about any new band “making it,” particularly if said new band doesn’t look like they’ve sufficiently suffered for their success. 

More pertinently, there are some people who reached this sorry state without ever having washed-out themselves, or even having played a note of music. For some, just being a major fan of an underappreciated band, be they Big Star or just some old housemates who played in the best Shellac cover band in Denver, is enough to spark a lifetime of online postings about how the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is just a popularity contest, as evidenced by yet another year passing without Circus Lupus being honored. I know this type exists because I have written those posts about Scrawl, the greatest band in the universe, and I stand by every word. For those types, especially the ones not blessed with my gratuitous levels of self awareness, a new record by Geese was always going to be a tough sell. 

The particular irony of the NYC chapter of the latter camp is that it’s made up of those old enough to remember a variation on this mindset which we all rolled our eyes about at the time. When the Strokes blew up, it was the final blow for a generation of below-14th St. bartenders who, at the ancient age of their early thirties, had been hoping that their rock star dreams might still happen just as soon as the DGeneration revival kicked in and/or Marky Ramone finished mixing the album. 

“The Strokes are rich kids,” they said, in between throwing coins left on the bar back in the face of NYU students. 

“Hipster shit,” they said because, at that time, hipsters could denigrate different hipsters with the term without getting called on it. In fact, even if we disagreed, we knew what they meant.

“A rip-off fad,” they said, adjusting their black string bracelets.

“NOT REAL NEW YORK ROCK,” they said. 

This last one might seem strange to those born in the 21st Century but, for the first few years of their fame, the Strokes, despite being from New York City, were considered—by many amongst the uplifted gourmandizer set—to be private school interlopers who made music exclusively for transplants. 

Appealing as all those arguments were, they were obliterated when exposed to the light of hard logic.

“Girls go to their shows,” we said. 

To this, our mentors could only turn up the Radio Birdman and tell us to go clean the ashtrays. 

That the above passion play is being reenacted in Ridgewood tonight, with some weathered alumni of Brooklyn Vegan’s Class of 2015 telling the kids that Geese are bullshit and that they should instead listen to real music like Diet Cig, is unlikely. Cultural fragmentation means that I strongly doubt that anyone in Hank Wood & the Hammerheads has even heard of Geese. As that particular band aggressively turned down every brass ring offered to them, there are probably better examples to choose from. But the point stands. To be annoyed by any perceived overrating of Geese, one has to be paying attention to the sort who overrate such things in the first place. 

In fairness to the many who made such complaints about the Strokes then, the less so who do so about Geese now, and to the extremely self-selected few who made/make those complaints about both, there are parallels. The members of both Geese and the Strokes do come from a variety of places of advantage. I’m pretty sure the Winters are in a significantly lower tax bracket than the Casablancas clan—with the young Geese ducklings (?) having attended Quaker/Montasori-lite schools as opposed to the exclusive private and/or Swiss schooling of the lil’ Strokes—I doubt that difference would mean too much to anyone whose public high school home room had thirty other students and a metal detector at the entrance. The matriarchal Ms. Winter’s freewheeling approach to extramarital relationships (as documented in her book, More: A Memoir of Open Marriage) is only racy enough to make non-bohemians blush. And it’s not even in the same zip code as the scumfuckery which the Strokes frontman’s estranged dad was credibly accused of. But her moral high ground probably isn’t too much comfort to any struggling musician whose parents don’t even rate a mention in the Daily News, let alone bold print ink in the New York Times. Without diminishing either the Strokes or Geese’s songwriting or charisma, the well off and high cheekboned do thrive in this world, and sometimes they do so in a manner less than commensurate to the ass-kickery of their riffs. It's just a fact that one has more time to learn Richard Lloyd/Tom Verlaine riffs when one doesn’t need to tend bar to support one’s hobby of paying rent or eating food. 

Comparisons between beloved rock bands need not be negative. As NYC-native writer Grace Robins-Somerville writes, about the same free show that I attended: “When I think about my New York upbringing, I see it with my face pressed to the glass of a cityscape diorama, like the ones I’ve seen at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. I think about the way I loved bands like The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV On The Radio, and LCD Soundsystem with a sense of hometown pride, cut with the knowledge that I’d missed out on their heyday by being a literal baby. Now, when I stand pressed up against the barricade, looking out over the mob of thrashing city kids—as well as the ones onstage—I feel like I’m witnessing a historic win.” While my take on the show was a bit more bemused, I was still glad to both read Robins-Somerville’s elegantly expressed enthusiasm and to recognize it. As both a transplant and peer to some of the above artists, my early-Aughts NYC pride was less hometown than it was my being fraternally proud of having played with the YYYs at a lesbian bar on Houston (as well as at the Parkside Lounge a month after 9/11), snobbishly proud of having seen TV On The Radio at the Stinger when they were a duo, and perversely proud of having served the Strokes beer when they were underage (as well as for being scolded by their manager for offering their drummer a bump right before they went on at Mercury Lounge), with all of that pride sharing space in my heart with a ravishing jealousy that would have made Othello suggest that I take it down a notch. Still, on occasion, I did feel that more expansive pride that Robins-Somerville describes. Increasingly—as I outlast my enemies, and friends from that time continue to impress me—I still do. 

Heck, when I interrogate my feelings about Geese achieving success with a sound different than what I’d maybe prefer—and accomplishing this without needing my CREEM profile from last year to do so—it’s almost like I’m twenty-six again, wondering when someone more famous than I am is going to thank me from stage.  

BUT I DIGRESS. Fairly or not, the case for Strokes/Geese class-war falls a bit apart when rarely applied equally to artists who we either like or who lend us money. It falls further apart in the face of how hard 3D Country bangs on a summer day, just like how Is This It did bang back at the turn of the century, when summer ended in August but it snowed in NYC all year round. 

Time and consensus heals all wounds. The Strokes are nowadays considered as iconic a “real” NYC band as, well, ok… a lot of the people who thought they were poseurs in 2002 probably continue to do so, but some have come around and a lot have died. And I did see Julian Casablancas perform a cover of “Walk On The Wildside” at the opening of the Time’s Square Levi’s store a few years back and nobody threw a “Die Yuppie Scum” shot glass at him or anything. 

As for Geese, like I said, they don’t get nearly as much shit for their backgrounds. This may be because they are only upper middle class by NYC standards. Or because they don’t affect slumming (outside of sharing in their generation’s predilection for dressing like entry-level management at Anthropologie). Or just because the Mitski Generational Wealth/CIA discourse of 2016-2018 was the last insufferable gasp of indie rock caring what anyone’s parents did for a living.

While you wouldn’t know it from the amount of space this essay devotes to the haters, it is far more fashionable to adore Geese than it is to feel any other emotion, positive or negative, about anything—short of genocide and/or Hasan Piker—currently happening on Earth. As is the case with any newly popular saviours of all guitar music of the last decade or so, the posi-postings about Geese have ranged from wild to borderline fascistic, with the baseline being either “I would kill a cop to be pegged by any member of Geese” or “I pity those who don’t love Getting Killed for their joyless subsistence through this life.” 

The latter has been the default smugness for indie fans ever since the late Aughts, when a switch was flipped and all of a sudden alternative rock was valued for how much fun it engendered. Having, in my youth, seen music less as something “fun” in of itself than as something that should be approximately two degrees separate from fun (i.e. go see music —> do drugs —> get into some weird shit with potentially life altering repercussions —> fun!), this notion has always been alien to me. Even now, in my onset declining years, I still prefer my fun the way I prefer my house parties; enjoyed from the kitchen. If my taste for adventure is less hijinks and more “new voices to try out on the cats,” the math remains largely intact. There’s me, there’s music (with which I gauge my relationship to death). Or there’s me, and there’s the music with which I pinball wizard to in the shower (NOT A EUPHEMISM). The former is not fun, it’s mnemonic. Even when related to things that haven’t happened. The latter singing along to Showering’s Greatest Hits is maybe fun, but only as fun as anything tethered to either nostalgia or imagining oneself as someone else might allow. 

Of course, having lived through my share of gruesomeness, I do understand the appeal of wanting music to be fun. Fun is, after all, fun. I know this because I’ve been to county fairs, and I’ve been a real shark at the ring toss. Still, I remain distrustful of anyone who goes too hard on the whole “joy” thing. 

I do, however, find myself more in sympathy with the Geese Stans’ hyperbole, while simultaneously finding those rabid fans less interesting than Geese’s discontents. 

To that sympathy; as I’ve repeatedly said and illustrated, I’ve done my share of Geese-related missionary work. I’m a fan. Not a “Stan” to the point of seeing Geese as anything more than simply the best young rock band going, but enough of a proselytizer to encourage the kids to hyperbolize about Geese like it’s a job in a walkable city that pays enough for a two-bedroom apartment shared by no more than four roommates. Generally, outside of Geese, I am ok with music fans scaling the most fantastical heights in order to describe how their team is Number 1 at making art. I know many of my peers frown on the sportifying of pop appreciation. And I wouldn’t say those peers are “wrong.” The focus on sales is, in particular, gross. Or at least that focus is antithetical to my chosen metrics for judging art (which are based on truth, beauty, my personal relationship to the artist in question, and my ideological relationship to said artist’s most vocal advocates). 

That said, I don’t actively stress over new parasocial norms. Perhaps because I’m too irrelevant (and/or male) to bear the brunt of any fandom treating my mentions like a Philadelphia hockey rink. Regardless, I’m too cynical about the machinery behind culture coverage to blame teenagers and perpetual twenty-six year-olds for being cultish idiots. The intelligentsia, on both sides of the rockist/poptimist aisle, has long held teenage judgement—if not always that of the boppers then at least that of the teen weirdos and manic sprites—in the highest regard. Almost as if our livelihoods depended on it. So, while I may not like teenagers now any more than I did when I was 16, I can’t say that I see much moral difference between Swifties worshiping their idol as infallible and critics allowing whatever cultural context surrounds any given Swiftian product to affect their judgement as much as (if not more than) the Swiftopian product itself. (This objectivity extends to pop ‘n rock profiteers with names less conducive to morphological derivation.)

My tolerance applies to the kinkier hyperboles as well, even as those hyperboles veer wildly between the puritanical and the libertine. Last year, when I asked Cameron Winter about his and the band’s relationship statuses, I immediately felt like Linda Tripp grilling Monica Lewinsky about cigars. Despite this prudishness, the paradoxically oversexualized and infantilizing “daddy” and “mother” stuff of contemporary fandom doesn’t bother me much either. I used to partake in it myself, albeit ironically, when talking about the sexy babies in Iceage. If I don’t do it with Geese, it’s not out of fear of “cancellation.” Again, nobody cares what I do. Rather, it's because the even greater age-gap between myself and Geese’s members, and the fact that there’s a chick in the band, makes objectifying them less amusing (to me, and probably anyone else). Even with Iceage, the joke started to wear thin once Elias reached the level of sexual maturity required to co-habitate with Sky Ferreira. 

As for my not finding Geese fanatics—fascinating as individuals as they may be—as interesting as Geese detractors (as tedious irl as they, as individuals, may occasionally be), the reason is simple-ish. Basically, I’m not terribly curious why someone else likes something, especially pertaining to primal-coded arts like rhythm and blues etc. I’m academically happy for their happiness, but know well enough that true pleasure is physical and spiritual. To obsess over why someone loves what rock and roll they love is to walk the streets with a thermometer in hand, begging for an opening to tell you something as unmanageable as the weather. It’s why I disagree with one of the core tenets of hipster-hatred… I don’t believe in the concept of “poseurs” when it comes to rock music. Rock music is a rare and cool thing because “just hanging out” is baked into its art. Even if one’s joy (or whatever) is more derived from the social aspects of seeing a band then it is about the music, that to me is still sincere fandom. 

The previous paragraph, TO BE CLEAR, should not be misunderstood as a call to “let people enjoy things.” If one is so inclined, one should interfere with others’ terrible taste with all the righteous fervor of an inner-city violence interrupter, in a movie about a high school principal-turned-vigilante, whose untimely death moves the plot along. Just as fans are free to love what they love, and to do so as a mystery, you are free to be obnoxious about it. In terms of changing anyone’s mind, one’s efforts might be Sissiphean, but they might be funny too. And anyways, to paraphrase Jack Gilbert’s beloved poem about divorce: Sissiphus almost made it. A bunch of times! Maybe you’ll be the one to get that big rock over. 

The always thoughtful Miranda Reinert has a good short essay about some of the more irritating aspects of fandom (with Geese being the impetus if not the broader focus) where she also identifies some other types of both Stan and Hater. The perceived insincerity of any camp bothers her more than it does me (or at least more than, as middle aged person, I’m willing to admit to), and it’s possibly tied to her apostle-level denial of her being a music writer (despite her being a very good music writer). But that doesn’t mean that her cynicism is wrong and my willy-nilly acceptance is an accurate read on any of these jokers. I have the advantage of being at peace with my being a hipster while Reinert, inhabiting the inherently complex role of being a young Hold Steady fan, has to wrestle with the not entirely tenable contradiction for which all Hold Steady fans must suffer; that of loving beat poetry while disliking jazz. If she doesn’t love Geese, she must hate joy! Which, of course, is not the case. I think she’s having a pretty good time. And she knows her way around human weirdo feelings and how online people talk about art and taste. More than, at this juncture, I do. 

As we wrap up our exploration of Feelings About Geeses, it’s only fair to point out that some of the Geese-haters-of-a-certain-age are just from Cleveland (or that town’s spiritual equivalents). Geese’s vibey shit was never going to fly for anyone whose parents made sure they knew all the words to “What’s This Shit Called Love?” before they heard a lick of Rundgren (at which point the parents would go off for a softpack of Chesterfield Kings, never to return). So, there’s a third camp as well but, even in this game of centimeters, it’s not one that’s statistically relevant for our purposes. 

The larger gamut of those with strong opinions about rock and roll’s newest saviours is made up of the now-dependable tropes of cultish fans; those who wage online jihad on the band’s behalf, parse every Geese lyric, and worrywart over whether Cameron Winter will ever find a pair of feet that love him back, and the just as inevitable kneejerk Geese opposition. The uncapitalized avidity of the former may irritate the living fuck out of the latter (and vice versa). Both groups operate within the same tradition and out of similar impulses, but the fans do have an advantage in that they’d definitely still exist without the haters. Whereas, as anyone who’s seen any of the Batman movies will tell you, the haters might not exist were it not for the entirely human need to occasionally tell the enthusiasts next door to shut the fuck up. As much as it’s generally agreed that Stan culture has somewhat ruined whatever life is left on this planet lucky enough to be untouched by anything real (whatever “real” might mean on this side of the veil), it’s a nice almost-anachronism to see all this brawling applied to conflicting concerns over a rock and roll outfit. It’s like watching poetry, after all this time, make something happen. Or, if that allusion is too hoity-toity, it’s like we’re all our very own small-stakes Gallagher Brother. And Geese is either the other brother or Blur; the watermelon or the mallet, depending on your POV. And if that allusion doesn’t work for you, might I interest you in the notion that treating aesthetics like either missionary work or a witch trial is a lot like how it feels to live in America today?

THANKS FOR READING. Please share and subscribe. Please subscribe to CREEM. Please check out my music and my wife's music. More than all of that tho... please VOTE MAMDANI. Thanks.

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