“I got a lot of advice that it was too early to ‘go solo’,” Geese frontman Cameron Winter told NME last year about the world’s initial shrug at his move to go it alone. “Probably because most people feel that ‘solo albums’ come once a band is basically over the hill and that they’re usually uninspired cash grabs.”
Hell, you gotta make a dollar where you can in this day and age – but a Geese spin-off was hardly poised for the big bucks in 2024. “Rest assured,” he continued, “my solo album is unique: because barely anybody knows who my band is, I’m young and not afraid of living with my parents and I’m free to chase whatever ideas I want.”
Sure, Brooklyn indie kids and former NME cover stars Geese were a hot ticket when second album ‘3D Country’ fused cowboy psychedelia with the kind of jazzy art-punk that had been tickling the whiskered chins of 6 Music dads for some time in the UK in 2023, but who could have seen this coming? Geese: now 2025’s most talked-about band and due to bother the top-spot of many an end-of-year list with the stellar full-spectrum rock of ‘Getting Killed’? But what blew the gates wide open for this moment was Winter’s Lou Reed-inspired solo debut ‘Heavy Metal’.
Some late-night US TV spots and an appearance on Jools Holland acted as a Trojan horse to show the world what this 23-year-old does better than many twice or thrice his age. Now the sold-out Roundhouse crowd of indie teens, art school kids, devotees from across Europe and informed oldies gasp as there’s a crack in the stage curtain before the giddy joy of Winter simply sitting at a piano in silhouette. Elation, then silence again.
There’s no Instagram-ready spectacle, no distracting crowd chatter, and little to no constant phone filming. There’s a rare purity to proceedings. The Geese star doesn’t even face the crowd. “Turn around!” someone yells from the rafters at one point. “Isn’t this enough for you people?” Winter cheekily drawls in response. Too much, perhaps. We spy at least four people fainting around the balmy Roundhouse as the crowd stand in full salute for the fever dream poetry of ‘Try As I May’, the surreal and soulful ‘The Rolling Stones’, skyward and spritely ‘Love Takes Miles’ and the street preacher strut of ‘Nausicaä (Love Will Be Revealed)’ through to the almighty and fittingly possessed ‘$0’ convincing the staunchest atheist hipster that “I’m not kidding, God is actually real”. We have seen the light!
The whole show is captured in the dynamics of ‘Drinking Age’. From a tinkle of the ivories to absolutely hammering that Steinway well into next year and a sustained howl to the moon, Winter somehow pulls off the stripped-back but maximalist, elemental but cosmic, a lightness of touch that lands with a hammer-blow – existentialism, heaven, hell and all in between.
Winter could sing the phone book and still drop your jaw. He’s the post-punk Rufus Wainwright you can listen to alongside The Strokes and Arctic Monkeys, a Gen Z Tom Waits for a generation done with TikTok tyranny, a new Nick Cave in the nick of time – ultimately a soul beyond his years but one necessary and adept to speak to his own era.
You’ll hear us gabble about Geese until the flock flies home. They’re an awesome force of musicality lightyears beyond the sum of their parts, and alongside Fontaines D.C., one that will go on to be one of the defining bands of this decade. But away from all that noise tonight, Cameron Winter has the power, talent and magnetism of a future great – a star to go the distance with just that voice, a piano and a whole world quite literally at his fingertips.
Cameron Winter played:
‘Try as I May’
‘Emperor XIII in Shades’
‘The Rolling Stones’
‘Love Takes Miles’
‘Drinking Age’
‘Serious World’
‘Nausicaä (Love Will Be Revealed)’
‘If You Turn Back Now’
‘Vines’
‘Nina + Field of Cops’
‘$0’
‘Take It With You’
‘Cancer of the Skull’