How Geese’s ultimate mission could be both their legacy and their undoing
Geese are far from an overnight success. A quick search on YouTube will turn up footage of a teenage Cameron Winter and the rest of the band working through early versions of songs that would later appear on their self-released 2016 debut, A Beautiful Memory.
At the time, the band members were not even old enough to get into most venues without adult supervision, yet back home they were already laying the foundations of their future. They were writing their own songs and learning how to balance their live energy with the growing interest in studio experimentation that came with their developing skills. In the process, the four New Yorkers were building the approach that would serve them so well in the years ahead.
And still serves them well. Their most recent album, Getting Killed, which brought in a whole new wave of attention, was made in the exact same way. Written by the band, performed basically by the band alone, produced by the band. Any extra intervention is kept to an absolute minimum.
“We make music the same way we always have. We’ve been recording music for ourselves for like, ten years at this point,” Winter told Sabukaru. By now, they’re masters at their craft, and it’s clear that while they might still be young, they’re in no way new or amateurs.
What’s also clear is where their motivation and mission lie. “[We] really just care about music and mostly everything else is secondary but only exists because you care about the music so much,” Emily Green said. That’s proved in the fact that the band don’t do that many interviews and doesn’t seem at all interested in the glamour of it all. When they won ‘Best International Band’ at the Brits, it’s not like they cleared their calendars to be there. Only bassist Max Bassin showed, got drunk off the free booze, said “free Palestine” instead of any speech, got swiftly bleeped, and then left.
Even from their music alone, it’s clear they’re not in it for the awards or the mainstream success. After 3D Country turned them into bona fide critical darlings with a devoted cult following, they could have followed that up with something more mainstream, levelling up the more indie or classic rock sides of that record. Instead, they gave us Winter screaming “There’s a bomb in my car”, and the band openly calling ‘Taxes’, the closest song to a mainstream appealing rock hit, “Lame”.
But then that thing happened, that mysterious thing, where a band gets huge without even really trying.
Even as it all came out that Geese had hired a marketing team to help get their music in front of the right people, the crucial word is the ‘right’ people. They were only trying to get the fan base their music rightfully deserved. But along the way, seemingly by accident, they became a phenomenon. By now, people far beyond their expected base know their name, especially now that Winter was spotted out and about with pop superstar Olivia Rodrigo, leading even Teen Vogue to run an introduction piece with the headline, ‘Who is Cameron Winter?’
For some acts, it would be a moment of celebration, but for Geese, it’s like you can hear the tense music playing. “We never wanted to be a big band. We always wanted to be an important band, like an influential band,” guitarist Dominic Digesu said of their mission statement, so does their new fame put it under threat?
It seems like the band is doing their best to keep it under control. If they’d really wanted to, they could have venue-upgraded their whole last tour, given the absolute blood battle there was for tickets, but they didn’t. They could be putting out a whole bunch of bonus tracks, ramping up all their touring plans, appearing in every possible publication going, but they haven’t.
However, hype is a beast beyond a band’s control, and from some reports from the crowds at their shows, as the fanbase grows, so too do the number of people standing there with their arms crossed, killing the vibe with their scepticism or diving into the mosh too early, not knowing the songs but determined to vapidly be a part of the moment.
Only time will tell, and really, only their next album will tell if the hype gets to their head as the expected audience looms way larger, or if they can keep things rolling down the same self-contained path of greatness.
