A young and relatively new bard hails from Long Island, and his name is Cameron Winter. The band Geese (made up of Winter, Max Bassin, Emily Green, and Dominic Digesu)—of which he is the lead singer—has turned his stunning, at times indecipherable, at times earnest, songwriting into revelation. For some, his idiosyncratic fusion of the mythic, the vulgar, and the religious in his lyrics is more joke than talent. Others can’t help but return to it and seek out its meandering evocations supported and amplified by Digesu’s groovy bass, Bassin’s tight drumming, and Green’s vulnerable guitar melodies.
The critics love Winter and Geese—as do I. Lindsay Zoladz of The New York Times named Getting Killed, Geese’s third studio album, the best record of the year in 2025. GQ profiled the young rock stars to uncover their influences, from Radiohead to Bob Dylan. Pitchfork heaped praise upon both Winter’s 2024 solo album Heavy Metal and Geese’s Getting Killed. Geese has been featured on NPR’s Tiny Desk and on Saturday Night Live. Already they are leaving a mark in the contemporary North American music scene, poised to be remembered as a great band.
Mystery has, no doubt, played a role in Winter’s rise. His lack of social media presence and his sold out solo piano performances made him into a contemporary myth. The lucky (and rich) who can get their hands on concert tickets get to witness his artistry at venues ranging from Rockefeller Chapel in Chicago to Carnegie Hall in New York. Behold the young Gen-Zer (can anything good come from Gen Z?), turned away from the audience, his slim figure draped in all-black pants and a button-up, as he arches his back over a magnificent grand piano. The rest of us have to tune in through bootlegged recordings on YouTube and Tik-Tok. Such are the contradictions of this emerging artist, who makes a mockery of internet access even as his fame depends on the enigma the internet ecosystem helped create.
But enigma and intrigue are not what make Winter and Geese’s music compelling to me. I think Gen Z is listening to Geese because those apocalyptic, heady, and vertiginous songs speak to the atmosphere of dread and violence that has surrounded all of our lives. For us, childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood have all been marked by terminal uncertainty and the collapse of social institutions that our elders promised would lead to a good life. There was 9/11, its spectacle war on terror and its Islamaphobia; there was the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, in which we watched our friends and families lose their homes and jobs as the wealthy profited; there was the rise of social media, our feeds inundated by videos of police regularly killing Black and Brown people; there was an unending string of school shootings, because of which we were trained to lock ourselves in classrooms to hide in the case of a frenzied, despairing gunman; and there was the COVID-19 pandemic, which claimed 1 million deaths globally by September 2020. There was, and is, Donald Trump and his war against migrants; there was, and is, the consolidation of wealth among fewer and fewer people, as billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk continue to reap the profits from the labor power of their employees.
