Geese: Cult Classics
From first emerging in lockdown with their brand of restless, chaotic rock and roll, through to playing frenzied secret shows and shutting down streets in Brooklyn just a few years on, New York’s Geese are very much the band of the hour right now. With their latest album - the expansive, experimental ‘Getting Killed’ - they go one step further to prove they’re more than worth the hype.
“I sort of thought the solo album had failed,” says Cameron Winter, frontman of Geese - the New York-based quartet who’ve just unveiled their third LP, ‘Getting Killed’. The record Winter is referring to is ‘Heavy Metal’ - his debut full-length under his own name. Released at the end of last year, it most certainly did not fail: reviews dubbed it “casually virtuosic”, and compared it to Astral Weeks; even Nick Cave called it “a racked and wondrous thing”. Winter didn’t hang around to smell the roses, though. Just months later, Geese would announce ‘Getting Killed’ and release the jangling indie-pop of ‘Taxes’ - the album’s lead single, and a world away from his solo material.
It’s fair to say that ‘Heavy Metal’ was the album that changed things for Cameron, and by extension for his bandmates - drummer Max Bassin, guitarist Emily Green and bassist Dominic DiGesu. They were held in high regard before, sure; their previous records have come produced by Dan Carey and James Ford, neither known for betting on losing horses. Debut album ‘Projector’ established their brand of post-rock, all Strokes-esque melodies colliding with fractured time-signatures. ‘3D Country’, their second, feels in hindsight like the first clue the band weren’t just going through the motions, pivoting musically to Americana influences and lyrically to a strange, crazed take on a Western film.
There was no small amount of pressure, then, on ‘Getting Killed’. Live dates sold out well before the album was released, and all three singles seemed to point to entirely different directions that the LP might take. But, put simply, Winter and co have delivered and then some. On their latest, the band play a glorious game of cat-and-mouse, showing off beautiful kernels of songwriting and then obscuring them almost as quickly with bizarre and enchanting left turns. Endlessly inventive, it’s hard not to see them stepping into the void left behind by a band like black midi; their sonic palette veers between jam band funk, spider web guitars that evoke ‘In Rainbows’, and free jazz meltdowns, all underpinned by Winter’s distinctive gravelly delivery - at times a croon, at times a wail.
DIY are talking to Winter and Bassin just a few days after the album’s release, with the band back on home turf. Having put on a free show in Brooklyn to celebrate, they played in the middle of a street packed entirely with fans already singing ‘Getting Killed’’s lyrics back at them. “We didn’t expect it to be so crazy,” grins Bassin, speaking in an irrepressibly excitable tone of voice, a yin to Winter’s monotone yang. “It felt very much like our version of The Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’ [rooftop performance] sort of thing - except we were on the street, and there were a couple of people on rooftops that had paid for day passes for gym membership, so they could get up there and hang. Crazy.”
Winter is characteristically understated when talking about the show, and the album release as a whole. “Yeah… pretty good,” he says, in a tone almost entirely devoid of enthusiasm. It’s probably worth noting at this point that Cameron isn’t known for being the most straightforward of interviewees. He treats press as an extension of his bizarre lyrics, sometimes outwardly lying (he has claimed that a five-year-old played bass on ‘Heavy Metal’) and pausing for minutes on end whilst working out what he wants to say. Speaking over Zoom today, sat outside a café, he explains that his perception of his solo album having failed (“because it took a little while for it to get off the ground”) informed ‘Getting Killed’ in that it made him think, “‘Alright, I’m gonna do [it] better, I’m gonna do a fixed version with the band that’s louder and less… sleepy’.”
Regardless, he’s totally bemused by not only his solo success, but also his band’s. “I don’t know how or why, but people started liking it more, and I think that let people give me the benefit of the doubt more than ever before, you know?” he says, looking into the middle distance. “Before, when we were to do certain things, people would [say], ‘these guys don’t know what they’re doing!’, but now they’re willing to jump on the bandwagon more easily, maybe.” It seems that Geese are fairly immune to external views of their work, and are their own critics first and foremost. “I guess we get bored, we’re just overly self-conscious about some things. We don’t want to make the same stuff, because it’s embarrassing for us.”
So what exactly were the band chasing on ‘Getting Killed’? “A lot of what we were trying to do was focus on groove,” notes Bassin, perhaps not unsurprisingly for a drummer. “We all got really into free jazz, and some funk. Everything went a little full-circle; we were listening to a lot of proto-punk stuff, which is really influenced by a lot of funk stuff, which is influenced by a lot of jazz stuff. It all kind of went backwards in that direction.” It’s true that much of the album - such as the insistent pulse of ‘Islands of Men’ - has an almost circular feel, more indebted to jazz structures than a traditional verse-chorus-bridge. Max describes it as “playing around some sort of groove that feels almost like it doesn’t end.”
This time around, the band were produced by Kenny Beats - aka Kenneth Blume - a former hip-hop beatmaker who is now one of rock and pop’s most versatile studio hands, working with everyone from IDLES to Toro Y Moi and Rachel Chinouriri. He also has the strange quality – for a rock producer, at least – of being a minor celebrity in his own right. Until 2024, he hosted the viral YouTube series The Cave, where he would produce a beat for rappers in ten minutes (with hilarious results, thanks to the interplay of Beats’ enthusiasm and casual banter). “He’s a legend, you know?” grins Max. “We’re used to working with producers that are a fair bit older than us, and have a similar outlook on music. Kenny’s a lot closer to us in age, and just in vibe. He’s also chronically on the internet.”
The band also savoured Beats’ lack of connection to the ecosystem of self-referential bands that Geese exist in. “It was nice to make a rock album with someone who wasn’t as hip to certain obscure, pretentious rock music as we were,” says Cameron. “A lot of rock producers, I think, try and really impress with referencing all these acts. He hadn’t really listened to Captain Beefheart, Wire, Flipper, stuff like that, so we got to introduce him.” What did Beats make of their touchpoints? “He liked it,” he smiles. “He liked all of it - or at least he pretended to, convincingly.”
What seems to come across most about the sessions is just how much material was actually written there and then in the studio. “We went out there with only a few of the songs really finished,” reflects Max. “So writing while recording felt like [saying], ‘these songs don’t exist yet, so why not throw a Rhythm King [drum machine] and trombone on it?’, you know? The second half of ‘Islands Of Men’ is totally different to how we used to play it. That was all just through playing it in the studio and thinking, ‘this doesn’t work, we’ve got to figure something else out’. It was good; it just led to us looking at the other songs and saying, ‘well, what can we fix about this one?’”
Both Cameron and Max separately use the word ‘fix’ to describe their approach to writing, perhaps belying their relentless push to reinvent themselves. “We hold ourselves to a very high standard, but then also, sometimes it’s tough to see when it’s just too much,” explains Max. “But then, to fix it is just to find the place where it clicks for all of us, where all of us get really excited about it. Because [when] we’ve let songs sit, and re-recorded them in a totally different way, it’s been like, ‘oh, that’s how it’s supposed to sound, perfect’.”
This restlessness also seems to mean that they take nobody else’s opinion on their music seriously. “When stuff comes out, I don’t believe anybody,” says Cameron. “[Regarding] the people who are speaking negatively about it, I just think ‘well, you just don’t get it, you stupid idiot!’” He grins: “‘just give it a minute - you should listen to it seven more times at least before you take a stupid opinion like that!’ And then, with the people who love it to death, I’m just like, ‘oh, these bandwagon-jumpers, they don’t even know why they like it, they’re just lying to themselves, they’re trying to spin a narrative’. I just don’t believe anybody. I don’t know what would make me… I don’t know what would satisfy me in that regard.”
One answer to that question – whose opinion, exactly, to take seriously as an artist – is often your peers’. Winter has no shortage of heroes lining up to sing his praises (take MJ Lenderman, or the aforementioned Nick Cave). Does he believe them? “Yeah…” thinks Cameron, seemingly caught off-guard. He pauses for a while. “That’s actually the best part of having a platform, because you get to sort of feel like a peer to people who you really respect. That is a nourishing thing, and I’m very lucky that a lot of bands have been pretty nice to me, or friendly, or complimentary. That stuff feels good, it does.”
In truth, the band’s last few months have had no shortage of pinch-yourself moments. Geese were in London the week before their album release, playing two slightly different live sessions in support of the record. First, they headlined two nights at The George Tavern - the beloved Shadwell venue currently celebrating its 21st birthday - with other headliners including John Cooper Clarke and King Krule. “It was awesome, people were singing the riffs to the songs,” Max says, shaking his head. “It still makes me feel a certain type of way, it’s just a crazy, weird thing. We started playing ‘Cowboy Nudes’ and everyone was doing it; it was very cool. I’ve got a ‘Save The George Tavern’ shirt, I’m locked in for life!”
Their other commitment whilst in town was with Nigel Godrich, legendary Radiohead producer and the man behind the ‘From The Basement’ sessions. For a band such as Geese - a constantly evolving outfit, with an idiosyncratic, instantly recognisable singer - playing for the man who produced Radiohead must be a strange coming-of-age? “Radiohead’s ‘From The Basement’ was something that we had always been interested in, and it sounds so good. We had such a busy week in London, we just showed up to the studio and Nigel walked in,” Max recalls. “He was asking me about microphone placement, you know? ‘If I put this super expensive overhead microphone’ - that presumably every Radiohead drum part has been recorded on – ‘right here, are you gonna hit it with your sticks?’ ‘No, don’t worry, Nigel Godrich, I’ll try not to!’” Bassin laughs.
‘Getting Killed’ concludes with ‘Long Island City Here I Come’, an extraordinary closing moment featuring a relentless piano line and Winter’s fraught crooning, which reaches fever pitch as he incants “here I come, here I come” over and over. “It was pretty obvious once we recorded it that none of the other songs would make as much sense as the last one,” he says. “It was a solo song first, and then just on a lark we tried it as a full band, and I thought ‘wow, this is way better’. So there it was.”
Winter’s voice feels, at times, like a character itself on the record - truly one of those strange, virtuosic singing voices that feels entirely unlike anyone else. When asked how it came about, Winter seems puzzled by the question. “I don’t know. I’m just not very self-conscious about it, and that can lead to some weird places, and that’s kind of just how I sing. I’m really not trying an effect or anything.” This, really, gets to the heart of his appeal as a songwriter – he seems totally disconnected from how his work might be perceived, and is just making something completely off the wall. “It’s a weird mix of being totally unself-conscious, and also being pretty disciplined, too. A lack of self-consciousness doesn’t mean you should be lazy or anything. [You shouldn’t be] so unself-conscious that you put out something terrible, that sort of just flops over and dies.”
At this point, it doesn’t seem like that’s a concern for Geese. It also appears that, at least according to other interviews, ‘Getting Killed’’s follow-up could already be recorded. Cameron groans at the mention of this. “That’s overblown. I want to put that to rest, because I feel so bad, everyone’s getting so excited about it. That’s not really what’s happening - we’re just kind of dicking around,” he says, shaking his head. So, no new Geese album come Monday? “No, no, no… Tuesday at least. I’m breaking the news in DIY, that that’s basically a rumour that GQ has propagated.”
As ever with Geese, it’s hard to know where exactly we are in the grey area between the truth as Cameron sees it and the truth as the rest of the band see it, given their frontman’s penchant for fibbing for sport. Max smirks when asked if a new album exists: “Maybe.” After a pause, he leans in, smiling. “I don’t know, actually. To be entirely honest, I want to say maybe, but also then I’ll talk to Cameron and he’ll say ‘it’s not done. It’s not even anywhere done, we’ve got to cut half of these songs’. So we’ll see.”
If this ambiguous follow-up is anything like ‘Getting Killed’, then we’re in for a treat. But for the moment - much like everyone else - we’re at the whim of Cameron Winter.
‘Getting Killed’ is out now via Partisan Records.
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