3D Country

The Cowboy at the End of the World

When Brooklyn's Geese announced their second album, the title seemed like an absurdist provocation. But 3D Country, released June 23, 2023 on Partisan Records,^[1] turned out to be one of the most conceptually ambitious rock albums of the year: a psychedelic fever dream draped in American mythology and shot through with existential dread.^[2]

The album centers on a character that frontman Cameron Winter conceived on a New York City subway ride: a stoic cowboy who ingests psychedelics in the Wild West and permanently fractures his sense of reality.^[3] The figure arrives as an archetype, hardened and self-assured, something out of a Cormac McCarthy novel. Over the course of the record he unravels completely, experiencing visions that leap across centuries and continents. It is an audacious premise, one that could easily tip into parody, but Geese use it as genuine scaffolding for a meditation on identity, masculinity, and what it means to hold the self together when the world seems to be coming apart.^[4]

The Opening Shot: “2122”

The album's opening track began, by Winter's own account, with a single vocal line that arrived to him on a New York City subway car, well before he had any sense of what the rest of the song would become or precisely what that first line meant ^[3]. He has described the track's intent bluntly: half dad-rock, half harsh, cacophonous noise, with dissonant elements layered in on purpose so the song would not simply read as a Led Zeppelin tribute, a distinction the band has said it finds endlessly funny given how openly the track still leans on that lineage ^[3].

That opener sets the album's emotional temperature immediately, framing apocalypse, in Winter's own word, as the record's first order of business before any of the cowboy narrative's specifics arrive ^[3]. NME singled out the track for the way its classic-rock-inspired guitars expand into a theatrical, sprawling cacophony of jazz and country textures, an immediate signal that 3D Country would not sound like the band's debut ^[5]. “2122” has reportedly remained the band's own favorite song to perform live, continuing to evolve on stage well past the album's release ^[3].

Americana in Crisis

What gives the cowboy figure its resonance is that he is not just a fictional protagonist. He is a stand-in for a particular strain of American mythology: the rugged individualist who believes in mastery of the land, self-reliance, and permanence. On 3D Country, that myth collides headlong with the realities of the 21st century. NME described the album as a cynical take on Americana in the age of an imminent climate crisis, one that proved Geese to be a genuine tour-de-force.^[5]

Guitarist Foster Hudson articulated the album's emotional stance with unusual precision. Rather than despair or outrage at ecological catastrophe, the band sought to capture how it actually feels to live inside this situation, to find a way to coexist with what he called a horrible future.^[5] The album does not preach or warn. It renders the psychic texture of going through ordinary life, including falling in love, cracking jokes, and feeling excited about a guitar riff, with full awareness that the ground beneath everything is shifting.

Love as Survival

Underneath the apocalyptic cowboy narrative, 3D Country is also an album about tenderness. Rolling Stone noted that the record is, at its core, about finding love in catastrophic times: the way another person's presence can make catastrophe feel bearable, can make you feel, however briefly, that things are going to be all right.^[2]

This emotional dimension is what prevents the album from collapsing into nihilism. Winter's lyrics move between grandiose mythological imagery and intimate moments, sometimes within the same song. The contrast creates a kind of vertigo that feels true to being young in the present moment: watching the news, watching the planet, and then looking across a room at someone and feeling something private and warm that seems to exist outside of history.

“I See Myself” is the album's clearest embodiment of that tenderness. Winter has called it close to the band's first genuine love song, modeled on his favorite Funkadelic records for their simple structures and big, gospel-inflected backing choruses^[16][17]. He has also pointed to a darker undercurrent running beneath the warmth, describing a narrator who wants to shield someone he loves from a force that is both evil and unstoppable, a fear that sits comfortably alongside the record's wider apocalyptic imagery^[16][17]. Released as the album's fourth single on June 20, 2023, it also carries a quiet farewell: founding guitarist Foster Hudson takes the lead vocal on the track, one of his final recorded contributions before departing the band that December^[1].

Sound Without Borders

The album's thematic ambition is matched, perhaps exceeded, by its sonic range. Working with producer James Ford, known for his work with Arctic Monkeys and Depeche Mode, Geese recorded over three weeks at The Diamond Mine studio in Queens, New York.^[1] For the first time, they had access to backing vocalists, a string section, and the full resources of a professional recording environment.

The result is difficult to categorize. Pitchfork noted Geese's newfound emphasis on dynamics and space as the band evolved from its gritty post-punk origins into something considerably harder to label.^[6] Rolling Stone heard Steely Dan in the bongos and smooth backing harmonies, Talking Heads in the angular dance-rock arrangements, and classic rock sprawl in the extended instrumental passages.^[2] Relix called the record a volcanic, kaleidoscopic mix of heavily filtered classic rock and wild crooner punk.^[7]

One deep cut singled out for that shift is "Gravity Blues," a mid-album detour into blues balladry that a Still Listening Magazine review praised for its gut-wrenching harmonies, a moment of aching restraint amid the record's more maximalist impulses^[12].

The lead single "Mysterious Love" got a similarly self-aware treatment. Winter has described the track as being built from a dozen different '90s rock clichés mashed into one deliberately over-produced package^[14], and The Line of Best Fit singled it out for the way it lurches from a wall of angular distortion into what the review called "pistoning psychedelic power-pop" once the song shifts gears^[15].

Inside the recording sessions, multiple competing visions were in play. Winter approached the material from the perspective of a Ween record; drummer Max Bassin wanted the weight of Led Zeppelin.^[3] Ford's role was to hold that tension rather than resolve it. The band went further by using a roulette wheel to determine the daily recording order, a practice Winter credited with shaping the album's distinct and restless energy.^[4]

Winter has traced some of that widened palette to specific listening habits in the run-up to the record, citing Robbie Basho's Visions of the Country and Linda Sharrock's vocal performance on Black Woman as touchstones that pushed him toward a more sonorous, dramatic vocal style than Geese had used on Projector.^[11]

The band's arrival at this level of ambition traces back to a stroke of accidental good fortune. Geese's members were still teenagers when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down live touring entirely, and the band has said that inability to play shows probably worked in their favor: labels evaluating the group had nothing to go on except carefully assembled studio recordings, rather than the reality of a young band still finding its footing on stage, and Geese ended up at the center of a bidding war before signing with Partisan Records and Play It Again Sam^[13]. That unusual path, from self-produced basement demos straight into a label bidding war without ever having played a proper show, helped set up the resourced, high-ambition environment that made a record as sprawling as 3D Country possible just a few years later.

The Darkest Turn: “Undoer”

If the record's warmth lives in songs like “I See Myself,” its most extreme detour is the seven-minute “Undoer,” which several critics singled out as the album's standout precisely because of how far it strays from everything around it. NME called it “the real standout,”^[5] built from creeping bass and thrashing guitar that erupts into what the review described as horror-movie screaming, while Still Listening Magazine heard the track arriving at what it called explosive doomsday eruptions^[12].

One retrospective look at the album read “Undoer” as a song about the fear bound up in wanting to be completely known by someone else, staging that ordinary vulnerability as a kind of apocalyptic unmaking, and pointed to the band's tendency to let a song run past its structure entirely by the end^[18]. Musically, the track builds from a patient, creeping opening into a heavier, more aggressive register roughly halfway through, pulling in a nu-metal-adjacent heaviness and a passage of near-spoken delivery before the song dissolves into wordless screaming^[19]. Where much of the rest of the album wears its cowboy camp openly, “Undoer” plays its central fear completely straight, making it the moment 3D Country stops being fun on purpose.

A Band Becoming Itself

Geese's 2021 debut, Projector, announced a band with obvious chops and obvious debts, its post-punk energy drawing clear lines back to Television, The Velvet Underground, and the downtown New York tradition.^[8] 3D Country is the record where those debts begin to feel genuinely secondary to something the band is building on its own.

Winter acknowledged the shift directly, describing a deliberate move away from the introspective, self-conscious quality of the debut toward something more expansive and outward-looking.^[4] Paste Magazine named 3D Country Album of the Week at release, calling it at once theatrical, vicious, heartfelt, and daring.^[9] Rolling Stone listed it among the 40 best indie-rock albums of 2023.^[2] Even more measured notices, such as Pitchfork's score of 6.8, acknowledged that something genuinely distinctive was taking shape.^[6]

The album also marks a specific moment in the band's history. Foster Hudson, a founding guitarist, departed in December 2023 after the album cycle concluded.^[1] 3D Country is the last document of that particular configuration of the group, a fact that lends the record a bittersweet finality in retrospect.

The Weight of Being Young

There is something worth noting about the fact that 3D Country was made by people barely out of their teenage years, writing about the apocalypse, psychedelia, and ancient history while navigating first-time professional studio recording. The ambition is somewhat reckless, in the way that only bands young enough not to know they shouldn't attempt this tend to be.

That recklessness is also the album's most endearing quality. Geese are not pulling off every idea they attempt here. Some transitions are abrupt, some jokes land better than others. But the commitment to swinging as hard as possible, to filling the record with ideas it can barely contain, produces moments of genuine excitement that more cautious records rarely achieve.

The album ends with its most understated track, "St. Elmo," a spare closer that leans fully into country textures and suggests, quietly, that things have not gone well for the album's protagonist.^[10] It is a gentle note on which to end, after all that noise and ambition. The cowboy fades out. The world continues, however changed.