Geese

Geese formed in 2016, when its members were still at Brooklyn Friends School and Little Red School House in New York. They practised and recorded in the basement of the drummer Max Bassin’s home in Fort Greene. The singer, Cameron Winter, grew up in Park Slope and had turned to music after concussions ended his youth ice hockey.

They put out an EP and an album, A Beautiful Memory, on their own in 2018, and a second EP, Bottomless Pink Lagoon, in 2019. Some of them had places at Oberlin and Berklee, and the plan was to break up when they finished high school in 2020. Then their home-made demos drew interest from 4AD, Fat Possum and Sub Pop, and they signed with Partisan Records instead.

Geese made Projector in their senior year of high school, from late 2019 to early 2020, in Bassin’s basement, which they called the Nest, on recording gear his family had given him. They put it up on SoundCloud without announcing it. Willie Upbin found it there and became their manager, and the record went out to the A&R people at indie labels.

They chose Partisan, seeing their place in the industry as “the best of the worst”. Dan Carey mixed the album and Bernie Grundman mastered it, and it came out as their label debut. Critics heard post-punk in it, and in Rolling Stone Jon Dolan heard Thom Yorke, Julian Casablancas and Mark E. Smith in Winter’s voice, sometimes all within the same song.

3D Country follows an uptight cowboy as he wanders through the desert on psychedelics, watching the world around him, and his sense of himself, come apart. Its songs are about love, despair and the apocalypse, and the band added backing singers, strings and a second pianist to the five of them.

In Pitchfork, Brady Gerber wrote that Geese “evolves from its gritty post-punk origins into a proudly outrageous jam band”. Songs left over from the sessions became the 4D Country EP that October. It was the last record with the guitarist Foster Hudson, who left that December to concentrate on his studies.

Geese announced 4D Country in September 2023, in the middle of a UK headline tour, and put out its first single, “Jesse”, the same day. The EP gathers four songs from the 3D Country sessions that did not make the album, and opens with a reworking of the album’s title track that runs to seven minutes.

“Jesse” started out fast, Winter said, “then morphed into a slower, psych-ier, more soulful track.” It was left off 3D Country “because we didn’t feel like there was a good place for it.” Two months after it came out, the band announced that Foster Hudson was leaving.

Winter had been writing songs of his own for years and worried a solo record would sound like “diet Geese”. He began in July 2023 with Loren Humphrey, who had engineered 3D Country, at Humphrey’s studio in Tuxedo, New York, and played most of the instruments himself. He expected it to take four months. It took a year, through a depressive episode and many revisions.

Partisan doubted it would sell. Its founder, Tim Putnam, said it would not earn Winter enough to leave his parents’ house, and Winter answered in a press statement: “I’m young and not afraid of living with my parents.” The label put it out in December, a quiet month for reviews. It became a cult success, and the attention it drew turned back towards Geese.

The hip-hop producer Kenneth Blume, Kenny Beats, met the band at Austin City Limits in 2024. He found their first demos chaotic until he heard Heavy Metal, which showed him how the songs worked. In January 2025 Geese spent ten days of fourteen-hour sessions at his Putnam Hill studio in Los Angeles, while smoke and ash from the wildfires hung over the city. They arrived with about twenty unfinished demos and built much of the album out of thirty-minute jams.

Winter said Heavy Metal’s success gave him the confidence to make this one louder. Pitchfork called it the band’s “strangest and strongest work”, and The New Yorker and Stereogum both named it the best album of 2025.

On his first solo tour Winter played Carnegie Hall, alone at the piano, on December 11, 2025. Paul Thomas Anderson filmed the show, with help from Benny Safdie.

Partisan released the recording as Live at Carnegie Hall on October 9, 2026: nine songs from Heavy Metal and Singles, and three that had never been released, “It All Fell in the River”, “Emperor XIII in Shades” and “If You Turn Back Now”. Pitchfork’s Walden Green called it a “triumphal performance”.

The day after Getting Killed came out, thousands came to a free Geese show in Greenpoint, outside The Lot Radio. In November 2025 they became the first act in nearly three years to record a session for Nigel Godrich’s From the Basement.

In January 2026 the band played “Au Pays du Cocaine” and “Trinidad” on Saturday Night Live, and that year they played Coachella, Primavera Sound, Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza.