Geese

Geese are a Brooklyn art-rock band built around the songwriting and vocals of Cameron Winter. Their sound has continued to evolve rapidly across releases, moving from tightly wound guitar rock toward looser, more genre-porous material that folds in jazz, funk, and no-wave influences alongside straightforward noise and melody.

Winter was born on March 4, 2002, and grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, the son of composer Stewart Winter and writer Molly Roden Winter, whose memoir about her open marriage later became a talking point that has occasionally followed her son into interviews about his own work^[9]. He began writing songs around age ten and gave up youth ice hockey after a string of concussions, redirecting that competitive energy into music instead^[10]. He had been accepted to Boston University to study communications, but once Geese signed with Partisan Records while its members were still teenagers, he chose the band over college altogether^[9].

The band's roots go back to 2016, when Winter, Green, Bassin, and DiGesu were still students at Brooklyn's Friends School and the Little Red School House, having first met years earlier at Park Slope's youth-focused Rock School. They rehearsed and recorded early material in Bassin's basement in Fort Greene, their first collaborative song reportedly a cover of Tame Impala's "Mind Mischief," and the band's name traces back to guitarist Emily Green's own childhood nickname, "Goose"^[6]. The group self-released an EP and the album A Beautiful Memory in 2018, followed by a second EP the next year, all later pulled from streaming. Members initially planned to disband after high school graduation in 2020 to attend colleges like Oberlin and Berklee, but their self-produced demos drew interest from labels including 4AD, Fat Possum, and Sub Pop before the band signed with Partisan Records instead^[6]. Partisan's A&R representative, Tim Putnam, is credited by Winter with winning the band over through an unusually low-key pitch, treating the signing as a long-term investment rather than trying to dazzle them, an approach that read as more trustworthy than flashier offers the band fielded elsewhere^[20].

The band's roots go back to 2016, when Winter, Green, DiGesu, and Bassin were teenagers attending Brooklyn Friends School and Little Red School House, first bonding over a shared cover of Tame Impala's "Mind Mischief" before starting to write original material together in Bassin's Fort Greene basement^[6]. The band's name came from Green's own childhood nickname, "Goose"^[6]. They nearly called it quits after graduating high school, but early label interest changed their minds, and they signed to Partisan Records and Play It Again Sam in 2020^[6]. A self-released debut, A Beautiful Memory (2018), was followed by their label debut Projector (2021), which paired post-rock structure with Strokes-indebted melody, and then 3D Country (2023), a chaotic pivot toward Americana textures^[6].

Projector was mixed by Dan Carey, a producer who had already shaped the sound of UK post-punk acts like Black Midi and Fontaines D.C., tying Geese's basement-recorded debut to that scene's aesthetic even though the band was working an ocean away and largely alone^[21]. Bernie Grundman handled mastering. The whole record, including its hushed penultimate track “Bottle,” was tracked on a home setup in Bassin's basement that the band nicknamed “the Nest,” fit in around coursework during their last two years of high school^[21].

One of that album's ballads, “First World Warrior,” began as a Winter penned entirely in a high school history class, its words growing out of what he called a selfish first-world guilt; guitarists Emily Green and Foster Hudson had already built the music into an ABAC-structured ballad before he set lyrics to it and capped the track with an orchestral swell.^[22]

Projector's second single, “Low Era,” involved its own kind of risk. The band had treated four-on-the-floor rhythm, the steady dance-music pulse underneath the song, as something close to a compositional taboo, and only wrote the track after deliberately setting that resistance aside to see whether something catchier and more danceable could still hold up to their standards^[24]. The gamble paid off beyond the record itself: in January 2022, Geese played “Low Era” on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the band's first appearance on network television, three years before the higher-profile crossover moment Getting Killed would bring^[23].

The band's jump from self-produced demos to a major-label deal happened almost entirely during the pandemic shutdown of live music, which Geese has credited with working in its favor: labels evaluating the band in 2020 had nothing to go on except carefully assembled studio recordings, rather than the reality of a group of teenagers 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^[16].

3D Country, released June 23, 2023, was the first time Geese worked with an outside producer, James Ford (Arctic Monkeys, Depeche Mode), tracking the album over several weeks at The Diamond Mine studio in Queens with access to a string section and guest backing vocalists for the first time^[13]. The record was loosely organized around an invented character, an uptight cowboy who takes psychedelic drugs in the desert and watches his sense of self dissolve, a premise the band used as scaffolding for songs about apocalyptic dread, tenderness, and American mythology under strain^[13]. Pitchfork heard a band evolving out of its post-punk origins into a looser, more genre-porous mode^[14], while Rolling Stone placed the album among the best indie rock releases of 2023^[15].

Amid that record's dread and mythology, “I See Myself” stood out as maybe the tenderest thing the band had put to tape. Winter has called it close to the band's first real love song, modeled on his favorite Funkadelic records for their simple structures and big, gospel-inflected backing choruses^[18][19]. A quiet farewell is folded into the same track: guitarist Foster Hudson sings lead on “I See Myself,” one of his final recorded contributions before leaving the band that December^[13].

That same year, the band followed 3D Country with 4D Country (October 2023), a five-song EP built from tracks that hadn't made the album's final sequence^[11]. Critics treated it as more than off-cuts: one review called the closing track, “Space Race,” possibly the best song the band had made up to that point, while another praised a newly supple, more emotionally direct side of Winter's voice on the same song, a quieter register than the vocal chaos he'd leaned on before^[12][11].

Winter has also been candid about how self-aware some of the band's material can be: he described 3D Country's lead single, "Mysterious Love," as a deliberate pastiche built from a dozen different '90s rock clichés mashed into one over-produced package^[17], a bit of self-mockery that runs alongside the band's more sincere ambitions rather than undercutting them.

Not everyone close to the band has been an easy sell on its more adventurous instincts. Winter has spoken about his own father, who has a musical background, half-jokingly questioning whether some of the noisier, more abrasive choices on Getting Killed would simply irritate listeners rather than reward them^[7], a bit of good-natured skepticism Winter has taken in stride even as he's continued to defend the record's willingness to court discomfort.

The band underwent a significant lineup change in late 2023, when guitarist Foster Hudson departed to pursue academic work, leaving Cameron Winter (vocals, guitar, keyboards), Emily Green (guitar), Dominic DiGesu (bass), and Max Bassin (drums) as a four-piece^[1]. That reduced lineup forced a tighter, more collaborative songwriting process, and the shift coincided with a burst of creative momentum for Winter individually: his solo album Heavy Metal, released in December 2024, gave him added confidence heading into the band's next record and a stated appetite for a louder, more forceful sound^[1]. Heavy Metal went on to earn wide acclaim of its own, with Pitchfork ranking it among the best albums of 2025, and Winter became one of the youngest artists to headline Carnegie Hall, a performance filmed by Paul Thomas Anderson^[9].

That next record, Getting Killed, was written and recorded under unusual pressure. The band arrived at Kenny Beats' Putnam Hill studio in Los Angeles in January 2025 with roughly twenty unfinished demos and ten days on the clock, working fourteen-hour sessions while the Southern California wildfires filled the surrounding air with smoke and ash. Long, loose thirty-minute jam sessions built around repetitive grooves ended up forming the skeleton of much of the album^[1]. Choosing Kenny Beats, a producer known almost entirely for his hip-hop work, was itself a deliberate attempt to escape the band's own indie-rock reference points, and it gave the record's rhythm section an unusually propulsive, hip-hop-inflected backbone underneath Winter's more traditionally rock-oriented songwriting^[4].

Released on September 26, 2025, Getting Killed became the moment Geese moved from critical darlings to a genuinely inescapable band, earning a Metacritic score of 89 and topping year-end lists at both The New Yorker and Stereogum^[1]. The album's afterlife has stretched well past its release date: Geese returned to national television in January 2026 with a Saturday Night Live appearance, backing Teyana Taylor's episode with a rendition of the album tracks "Au Pays du Cocaine" and "Trinidad"^[5][3], and the band went on to play their debut Coachella set that spring, drawing figures from Courtney Love to King Princess into the band's growing, and increasingly cross-genre, fan base^[3].