They\u2019re so unfastened as a result of they\u2019re so tight. When Geese take the stage, they don\u2019t re-create their recordings. It barely even looks like they\u2019re performing songs with an outlined construction \u2014 extra like summoning a well-recognized sequence of chords and lyrics from the ether, whipping round riffs and fills like a marionette\u2019s appendages. It\u2019s the type 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 the whole lot else, Geese have that going for them: They play like a single virtuosic organism.<\/p>\n
This was my important takeaway from seeing the world\u2019s buzziest indie band in motion Thursday night time. Geese had been headlining the Nelsonville Music Competition, a sustainably small-scale treasure that\u2019s been gathering an NPR-friendly assortment of native and international skills in rural southeast Ohio for the previous 25 years. Nestled close to Hocking School and simply down the street from Ohio College in Athens, NMF nearly feels too humble for a band that has blown as much as Geese\u2019s scope. It\u2019s a world-class music competition that operates extra like a group gathering. One of many facet phases is in the course of the woods, with a delegated hammock zone within the viewing space. Till his dying final yr, cult-favorite folkie Michael Hurley traveled yearly to Nelsonville from his house in Oregon, serving because the fest\u2019s animating spirit. Tim Peacock and his group haven’t any intention of turning into the following Coachella. But they persistently wrangle world-renowned performers for his or her pastoral get-together.<\/p>\n
Thursday at Snow Fork, Geese took the stage instantly 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 come back. However the first night time of the fest was inevitably all about Geese.<\/p>\n
Geese performed Nelsonville in 2023 once they had been touring their splendidly perverse basic rock sendup 3D Nation. Again then, they appeared like one idiosyncratic younger rock band amongst many. Now, within the wake of Cameron Winter\u2019s viral-hit solo album Heavy Metallic and the band\u2019s zeitgeist-defining masterpiece Getting Killed, they had been returning as conquering royalty, the act that broke containment to turn into probably the most extensively celebrated, hotly debated indie band in years. \u201cOur profile has grown, however we\u2019ve gotten worse at our devices,\u201d Winter cracked from the stage in his perpetual muppet voice, asking how many individuals within the fest\u2019s 6,000-capacity crowd noticed them three years in the past.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A good chunk of these folks won’t have been sufficiently old to attend a music competition unsupervised again then. Thursday at Nelsonville, Geese T-shirts had been omnipresent, largely worn by individuals who seemed like they had been of their teenagers or early twenties. Among the many many younger followers carrying the band\u2019s merch, a pair guys in matching selfmade tees caught my eye. The again of their black shirts confirmed a goose beneath the caption \u201cCAMERON WINTER (PICTURED BELOW) TRIED TO MKULTRA ME!!\u201d These amusing clothes alluded to the controversy that has additional sophisticated Geese\u2019s story in 2026.\u00a0<\/p>\n A couple of months in the past, the gifted singer-songwriter Eliza McLamb observed a Billboard interview during which staff of the advertising company Chaotic Good bragged about constructing buzz for albums together with Heavy Metallic and Getting Killed by manufacturing a whole bunch of faux social media accounts. Quickly, Wired printed a report declaring Geese\u2019s recognition a \u201cpsyop.\u201d Comparable 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 prepare, who went gaga for Getting Killed and voted it as the perfect album of 2025, these had 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?\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s naive to imagine making it huge within the music biz has ever been an natural course of. Once I was a sheltered child within the \u201990s, I assumed each band I found on MTV and the radio had ended up there due to their large recognition, when actually a few of them turned common as a result of some invisible hand had pushed them onto MTV and the radio. Advertising has all the time concerned a component of convincing you that this individual or product is already a sensation, and also you\u2019re lacking out. However there\u2019s a giant distinction between nudging a band into the highlight and inventing a sensation out of skinny air.<\/p>\n I\u2019m undecided we\u2019ll ever know if the preliminary spark that led to Geese\u2019s 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 via the noise had given solution to an inferno of genuine enthusiasm. These weren\u2019t bots swarming the streets of Brooklyn for Geese\u2019s launch present and flocking to their tour dates, and I noticed the throng on the mainstage Thursday with my very own eyes. \u201cPretend it \u2019til you make it\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Geese eased into their set, burrowing into the groove on open-ended Getting Killed songs \u201cIslands Of Man\u201d and \u201cHusbands\u201d earlier than ripping into the title monitor and turning all that potential vitality kinetic. The primary half of \u201cGetting Killed\u201d hit just like the demolition squad, the second half like the following gradual collapse as Winter warbled, \u201cI get fuckin\u2019 destroyed.\u201d From there they bounced between comparatively simple, riff-driven 3D Nation heaters and the brand new album\u2019s extra summary, rhythm-based excursions. They performed \u201cHalf Actual\u201d additional gradual and nasty, and later \u201cAu Pays du Cocaine\u201d additional gradual and fairly. After they locked in on \u201c100 Horses,\u201d you possibly can hear a lot historical past coursing via the music \u2014 flashes of the Stones and the Household Stone, of Radiohead and Speaking Heads, actual items with off-kilter swagger all their very own.<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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 the same 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\u2019s most discordant moments as if she\u2019s 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\u2019s unflappable, inscrutable presence or the guitar-bass interaction, however there\u2019s not one of the Strokes\u2019 mechanistic precision and proper angles on this band\u2019s swinging, throbbing, unstable music.<\/p>\n Winter seasons all that hubbub with beneficiant quantities of aloof weirdness, making even frequent patter like \u201cHow is all people?\u201d sound cartoonish. \u201cHave a look at all these Colombians in a single place,\u201d he bizarrely introduced at one level \u2014 presumably a reference to Columbus an hour up the street? \u201cThis tune\u2019s known as \u2018Bow Down,\u2019 it\u2019s about bowing down,\u201d he advised us later, simply earlier than singing, \u201cI 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.\u201d He was not above pausing to tune his guitar in the course of \u201cMysterious Love.\u201d<\/p>\n They saved their greatest hits for the top. The gang sung alongside to \u201cTaxes\u201d with reverence normally reserved for hymns, its verses culminating in that oh-so-satisfying second of liftoff when Winter declares, \u201cYou\u2019re gonna must nail me down.\u201d And when \u201cTrinidad\u201d inevitably closed issues out, that they had the entire competition floor howling, \u201cThere\u2019s a bomb in my automotive!\u201d as they launched into the harshest eruptions of the night time \u2014 one final clamorous sprawl passing via like a thunderstorm, washing the bizarre vibes away.<\/p>\n SETLIST:\u201cIslands Of Males\u201d\u201cHusbands\u201d\u201cGetting Killed\u201d\u201cCrusades\u201d\u201cMysterious Love\u201d\u201cHalf Actual\u201d\u201c2122\u201d\u201c100 Horses\u201d\u201cCowboy Nudes\u201d\u201cI See Myself\u201d\u201cGravity Blues\u201d\u201cCobra\u201d\u201cBow Down\u201d\u201cAu Pays du Cocaine\u201d\u201cTaxes\u201d\u201cTrinidad\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lede-admin.stereogum.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/64\/2026\/06\/NMF-Geese-Thurs-8.jpg?w=710\")
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