They’re so unfastened as a result of they’re so tight. When Geese take the stage, they don’t re-create their recordings. It barely even seems like they’re performing songs with an outlined construction — extra like summoning a well-recognized sequence of chords and lyrics from the ether, whipping round riffs and fills like a marionette’s appendages. It’s the sort of free-flowing organized chaos that may solely come from a hard-won mind-meld, from years spent coming of age collectively, devices in hand. Beneath all the pieces else, Geese have that going for them: They play like a single virtuosic organism.
This was my most important takeaway from seeing the world’s buzziest indie band in motion Thursday night time. Geese have been headlining the Nelsonville Music Competition, a sustainably small-scale treasure that’s been gathering an NPR-friendly assortment of native and international abilities in rural southeast Ohio for the previous 25 years. Nestled close to Hocking Faculty and simply down the street from Ohio College in Athens, NMF virtually feels too humble for a band that has blown as much as Geese’s scope. It’s a world-class music pageant that operates extra like a neighborhood gathering. One of many facet phases is in the midst of the woods, with a chosen hammock zone within the viewing space. Till his dying final yr, cult-favorite folkie Michael Hurley traveled yearly to Nelsonville from his residence in Oregon, serving because the fest’s animating spirit. Tim Peacock and his group haven’t any intention of turning into the subsequent Coachella. But they persistently wrangle world-renowned performers for his or her pastoral get-together.
Thursday at Snow Fork, Geese took the stage straight after fellow generational stars Wednesday, the climax of a playbill that additionally boasted Huge Freedia, Saintseneca, Anna Tivel, the Magic Tuber Stringband, and far more. NMF 2026 nonetheless has two extra days to go, with delights like Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, Mavis Staples, Styrofoam Winos, S.G. Goodman, Ken Pomeroy, Setting, Gwenifer Raymond, Thomas Dollbaum, Marcus King Band, Hannah Cohen, Fruit Bats, and Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band nonetheless to return. However the first night time of the fest was inevitably all about Geese.
Geese performed Nelsonville in 2023 once they have been touring their splendidly perverse traditional rock sendup 3D Nation. Again then, they appeared like one idiosyncratic younger rock band amongst many. Now, within the wake of Cameron Winter’s viral-hit solo album Heavy Metallic and the band’s zeitgeist-defining masterpiece Getting Killed, they have been returning as conquering royalty, the act that broke containment to develop into probably the most extensively celebrated, hotly debated indie band in years. “Our profile has grown, however we’ve gotten worse at our devices,” Winter cracked from the stage in his perpetual muppet voice, asking how many individuals within the fest’s 6,000-capacity crowd noticed them three years in the past.
An honest chunk of these folks won’t have been sufficiently old to attend a music pageant unsupervised again then. Thursday at Nelsonville, Geese T-shirts have been omnipresent, largely worn by individuals who regarded like they have been of their teenagers or early twenties. Among the many many younger followers sporting the band’s merch, a pair guys in matching home made tees caught my eye. The again of their black shirts confirmed a goose beneath the caption “CAMERON WINTER (PICTURED BELOW) TRIED TO MKULTRA ME!!” These amusing clothes alluded to the controversy that has additional sophisticated Geese’s story in 2026.
A number of months in the past, the gifted singer-songwriter Eliza McLamb observed a Billboard interview by which staff of the advertising company Chaotic Good bragged about constructing buzz for albums together with Heavy Metallic and Getting Killed by manufacturing tons of of pretend social media accounts. Quickly, Wired printed a report declaring Geese’s recognition a “psyop.” Related options emerged at The Guardian and New York, all the time with Winter because the face of this widespread astroturfing phenomenon. As somebody who was fortunately driving the Geese hype practice, who went gaga for Getting Killed and voted it as one of the best album of 2025, these have been alarming allegations. Like many, I believed I used to be watching the inspiring rise of my favourite new band. How a lot of my affection was the product of manipulation?
It’s naive to consider making it massive within the music biz has ever been an natural course of. After I was a sheltered child within the ’90s, I assumed each band I found on MTV and the radio had ended up there due to their huge recognition, when actually a few of them grew to become standard as a result of some invisible hand had pushed them onto MTV and the radio. Advertising and marketing has all the time concerned a component of convincing you that this individual or product is already a sensation, and also you’re lacking out. However there’s an enormous distinction between nudging a band into the highlight and inventing a sensation out of skinny air.
I’m undecided we’ll ever know if the preliminary spark that led to Geese’s ascension was real, however the fervor that broke out round them final yr was extraordinarily actual. By the point Getting Killed dropped in September, no matter fakery might need helped this band break by the noise had given technique to an inferno of genuine enthusiasm. These weren’t bots swarming the streets of Brooklyn for Geese’s launch present and flocking to their tour dates, and I noticed the throng on the mainstage Thursday with my very own eyes. “Pretend it ’til you make it” is a story as previous as time, and at this level folks actually care about this band. Seeing them in live performance was a reminder that they advantage our consideration.
Geese eased into their set, burrowing into the groove on open-ended Getting Killed songs “Islands Of Man” and “Husbands” earlier than ripping into the title observe and turning all that potential vitality kinetic. The primary half of “Getting Killed” hit just like the demolition squad, the second half like the following sluggish collapse as Winter warbled, “I get fuckin’ destroyed.” From there they bounced between comparatively simple, riff-driven 3D Nation heaters and the brand new album’s extra summary, rhythm-based excursions. They performed “Half Actual” additional sluggish and nasty, and later “Au Pays du Cocaine” additional sluggish and fairly. After they locked in on “100 Horses,” you would hear a lot historical past coursing by the music — flashes of the Stones and the Household Stone, of Radiohead and Speaking Heads, actual models with off-kilter swagger all their very own.
It’s a lot greater than the Cameron Winter present up there. Drummer Max Bassin performs exhausting and heavy, making a deep pocket but discovering area for gnarly fills and detours aplenty, like a sputtering engine that may bend the space-time continuum. Dom DiGesu brings an analogous aptitude to the bass, shifting intuitively from a low-end rumble to bursts of melody. Emily Inexperienced wrangles her guitar with an unusual depth, throwing her physique into Geese’s most discordant moments as if she’s personally cranking up the native barometric stress with every stab and squall. Together with touring keyboardist Sam Revaz, they make a racket that breathes. I get why folks generally hear echoes of NYC buzz-band forebears the Strokes in Winter’s unflappable, inscrutable presence or the guitar-bass interaction, however there’s not one of the Strokes’ mechanistic precision and proper angles on this band’s swinging, throbbing, risky music.
Winter seasons all that hubbub with beneficiant quantities of aloof weirdness, making even frequent patter like “How is all people?” sound cartoonish. “Take a look at all these Colombians in a single place,” he bizarrely introduced at one level — presumably a reference to Columbus an hour up the street? “This tune’s referred to as ‘Bow Down,’ it’s about bowing down,” he informed us later, simply earlier than singing, “I used to be a sailor, and now I am a ship/ I used to be a automotive, and now I am the street/ And I used to be kneeling on the turnpike with an angel down my throat.” He was not above pausing to tune his guitar in the midst of “Mysterious Love.”
They saved their largest hits for the top. The group sung alongside to “Taxes” with reverence normally reserved for hymns, its verses culminating in that oh-so-satisfying second of liftoff when Winter declares, “You’re gonna must nail me down.” And when “Trinidad” inevitably closed issues out, they’d the entire pageant floor howling, “There’s a bomb in my automotive!” as they launched into the harshest eruptions of the night time — one final clamorous sprawl passing by like a thunderstorm, washing the bizarre vibes away.
SETLIST:
“Islands Of Males”
“Husbands”
“Getting Killed”
“Crusades”
“Mysterious Love”
“Half Actual”
“2122”
“100 Horses”
“Cowboy Nudes”
“I See Myself”
“Gravity Blues”
“Cobra”
“Bow Down”
“Au Pays du Cocaine”
“Taxes”
“Trinidad”
