Interview Geese: “We wanted to be like Radiohead meets Yes meets religious experience”

“I think what this record says is that we really thought this would be the last Geese album. The performances are emotionally-driven because we really thought it would be our last project as a group,” declares frontman Cameron Winter. “We’d finished it up in 12th grade, and everyone had plans to move to different states and start different lives.”

However fate - or, more specifically, Partisan (home to IDLES, Fontaines DC et al) - had other plans, and last month’s debut LP proper ‘Projector’ marks not only a fresh platform for the band, who’ve been playing together since they were 12, but a visceral, eclectic new set of voices within 2021’s broad guitar scene.

Hailing from Brooklyn and with South London producer-du-jour Dan Carey (black midi, Squid) on board for the record, there are a number of obvious boxes you could put Geese in - with smudges of each finding their way into the moody Interpol anxieties of breakthrough single ‘Disco’ or the tricksy guitar interplay of ‘Fantasies / Survival’. More than any of that though, ‘Projector’’s most evident characteristic is of an almost overwhelming volume of ideas - something the band have been playing with since those formative, pre-teen moments.

“In our extra-curricular music club [at school], they’d put you in a band and you’d do classic rock covers, so then when we made our own band outside we were like, we’re gonna break away from that and make the coolest, craziest shit ever,” grins Cameron. “We’re gonna have five synths on stage and be like Radiohead meets Yes meets religious experience. We wanted to be the most insane 14-year-old band of all time.”

Within their current output (‘Disco’ is, essentially, four songs rolled into one), the quintet are arguably still implementing a more refined version of that. “I think we’re basically trying to take all of that influence and dial the sound back and hone it a bit more, even though we have a tendency to still try and do everything we possibly can,” concedes drummer Max Bassin.

And, having self-released a now-deleted early album back in 2018 that they joke as having “a very weird cult of a cult of a cult following”, now ‘Projector’ has gone from their ‘last record’ to the one that’s taking them out of college (sorry, teachers) and around the world. “It was perfect timing,” Max nods. “Now we’re like, let’s see where this music thing takes us and how far we can go with it.”