Projector

There is a trap waiting for any teenage band that attracts serious critical attention: reviewers spend so much energy marveling at the musicians' youth that they never quite say what makes the music actually matter. Geese mostly escaped that trap with Projector, their 2021 debut, even though the circumstances invited it. The five Brooklyn Friends School graduates recorded the album during their senior year^[1], signed to Partisan Records before most of them had a diploma, and released the record into a wave of notices that could not resist noting they were barely old enough to vote.

But the music demanded attention on its own terms. Projector is a debut of genuine density: anxious, restless, and structurally unpredictable in ways that reward repeated listening. It earned an 83 on Metacritic^[2], a four-star review from NME^[3], and landed on numerous year-end best-of lists.^[4] The youth angle was real, but it was the least interesting thing about the record.

The Persona Factory

The most distinctive element of Projector is not the guitar interplay or the tempo volatility, impressive as both are. It is lead vocalist Cameron Winter's practice of inhabiting extreme characters rather than speaking as himself. The album's narrators include an Alzheimer's patient losing grip on memory, a figure Winter described as approaching a bohemian serial killer perspective^[5], and a delusional, night-crawling character he characterized as an incel type.^[5] These are not gentle self-portraits.

Writing about the world through these removed perspectives gave Winter leverage. Rather than processing adolescent anxiety directly, he filtered it through the extreme. He described writing the first of these characters as "fun" and said it gave him confidence to write the rest of the album's lyrics.^[5] The approach has antecedents throughout art-rock history, from Television's fractured street-level perspectives to Talking Heads' deadpan character studies.^[6] But Geese apply it with enough irreverence that it feels like their own strategy rather than a borrowed one.

The album's closing track marks a meaningful shift. Winter has described it as his most personally vulnerable piece on the record, a step away from persona and toward his own view of confronting global hardship.^[5] That it arrives last creates a structural logic: the masks have gradually thinned. After spending most of the album behind invented voices, Winter finally speaks plainly, and the contrast carries real weight.

Anxiety and Euphoria

Projector's emotional arc does not follow a simple rise or descent. It moves between poles: tension and release, contraction and explosion. Songs do not resolve so much as pivot.^[5] A track that opens in one time signature arrives somewhere else entirely. A danceable groove slides into an extended atmospheric outro. Something that sounds like straightforward indie rock abruptly fractures into noise. The record is structurally restless in a way that keeps listeners on uncertain footing throughout.

This oscillation between anxiety and euphoria gives the album its nervous energy.^[4] The band has said openly that they enjoy confusing their listeners^[7], and the sequencing and song structures bear this out. You cannot settle into a groove without the record pulling the floor away. For teenage musicians, some of this instability is instinctive, but the confidence with which the band executes these pivots suggests deliberate craft.

Winter summarized the band's ideal in one interview: at its best, the music is something you really feel, but there is also guitar work your mind can keep chewing on.^[7] That dual ambition, visceral and cerebral at once, runs through every track. Projector is suspicious of passive listening and designed to resist it.

Under Constraint

Part of what makes Projector's ambition legible is understanding where it was built. The band recorded in drummer Max Bassin's Brooklyn basement studio, known among the group as "the Nest," during Friday-night sessions with strict timing restrictions and pipes that leaked onto amplifiers.^[1][7] Several members had accepted admissions to Oberlin College and Berklee College of Music. The album nearly did not happen at all.

The pandemic inadvertently gave the band time to develop. Before any label deal existed, a SoundCloud upload attracted attention from 4AD, Fat Possum, Sub Pop, and eventually Partisan Records, which the band signed to in mid-2020.^[1] Choosing Partisan meant deferring, or in some cases abandoning, the institutional paths the members had spent years working toward. The gamble was not obvious at the time.

The recording constraints shaped the music directly. Winter wrote guitar ideas during SAT prep classes and history lectures, texting himself before they disappeared.^[5] One song was rewritten entirely from scratch in a single sitting when the original version failed.^[5] Another was recorded at two in the morning with no soundproofing.^[5] This urgency is audible throughout the album, not as roughness but as a kinetic aliveness that polished studio recordings often cannot replicate.

New York as Context

Projector arrived in October 2021 at a moment of renewed critical fascination with post-punk. British bands like black midi, Squid, and Fontaines D.C. had spent several years redefining what guitar-based music could sound like, and Partisan Records, Geese's label, was home to several of them.^[1] Geese entered this conversation as Americans, filtered through a distinctly different lineage.

Critics heard Television, the Feelies, Parquet Courts, LCD Soundsystem, and the Strokes throughout the album's textures.^[6] Geese were simultaneously plugging into the British post-punk revival and into a tradition of downtown New York art-rock stretching back to the 1970s. In interviews, the band traced an influences arc from classic rock through prog and psych to the UK post-punk bands that had immediately preceded them^[7], a self-awareness about musical lineage that comes through in the record's range.

Dan Carey, who mixed the record, had also mixed black midi's debut and worked with Squid, sonically linking Geese to the UK scene.^[1] His contributions, including the addition of swarmatron processing on the album's most atmospheric track, helped thread the band's sound into the broader post-punk conversation without making it feel imported.^[5] Pitchfork raised the question of whether these Brooklyn teenagers were authentically occupying the post-punk tradition or aestheticizing it from a comfortable distance.^[8] The music does not entirely deflect that question, but it answers it with enough genuine strangeness to make the debate feel secondary.

Landing Fully-Formed

The critical consensus around Projector was unusual for a debut. NME called it one of the year's most thrilling rock debuts^[3], Rolling Stone described the band as indie-rock prodigies^[6], and Beats Per Minute praised the way the album felt like a band that had arrived already fully conscious of themselves and their craft.^[9] Even the more skeptical notices acknowledged the instrumental sophistication.

What is striking about Projector, listened to now, is how much more it holds than its own hype suggested. The critical fascination with the band's youth sometimes obscured what was genuinely remarkable: a debut that already knew what it was. The guitar interplay is complex without being fussy. The songs change shape with a confidence that bands often take years to develop. The personas Winter inhabits are drawn with enough specificity to unsettle.

Projector does not sound like teenage music. It sounds like music that happened to be made by teenagers, which is a stranger and more interesting thing.^[9] The band knew this about themselves. Winter told Stereogum they expected to be a pretty different group by the time a second album arrived.^[7] They were right about that too. But the debut they left behind remains a sharp, restless artifact of a specific moment: five teenagers in a leaking basement, writing through characters they were not, finding the music that turned out to be entirely theirs.