They feel incredibly unbound because they’re inseparably bound. When Geese take the stage, they don’t reproduce their studio cuts. It scarcely resembles a performance with a fixed song architecture — more like coaxing a familiar sequence of chords and lyrics from the ether, whirling through riffs and fills as if their limbs were strings on a marionette. It’s a kind of liberated, yet meticulously coordinated chaos that can only emerge from a hard-won chemistry, from years spent growing up together with instruments in hand. Beneath all else, Geese possess that core: they operate as a single, virtuosic organism.
This stood out as my principal impression of the world’s most talked-about indie act in action on Thursday night. Geese headlined the Nelsonville Music Festival, a sustainably intimate gem that has, for a quarter of a century, gathered an NPR-friendly mix of local and global talents in rural southeastern Ohio. Nestled beside Hocking College and just down the road from Ohio University in Athens, NMF almost feels too modest for a band that has grown to Geese’s scale. It’s a world-class music festival that runs more like a communal gathering. One side stage sits among the trees, with a hammock zone tucked into the viewing area. Until his passing last year, cult-favorite folk artist Michael Hurley returned annually to Nelsonville from Oregon, serving as the festival’s living spirit. Tim Peacock and his crew aren’t aiming to become the next Coachella. Yet they routinely lure internationally renowned performers to this pastoral gathering.
Geese appeared at Nelsonville on Thursday evening, immediately following fellow arising stars from the previous night, the peak of a lineup that also included Big Freedia, Saintseneca, Anna Tivel, the Magic Tuber Stringband, and more. NMF 2026 still has two days left, with treats 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 still on the docket. Still, the festival’s opening night was inevitably all about Geese.
Geese first played Nelsonville in 2023 when they were touring their wonderfully perverse classic-rock sendup 3D Country. At the time, they seemed like one idiosyncratic young rock band among a crowd of such outfits. Now, riding the wave of Cameron Winter’s viral solo release Heavy Metal and the band’s zeitgeist-defining masterwork Getting Killed, they returned as victorious sovereigns, the act that broke out of confinement to become the most widely celebrated, hotly debated indie phenomenon of recent memory. “Our profile has grown, but we’ve grown worse at our instruments,” Winter quipped from the stage in his signature puppet-like voice, asking how many people in the festival’s 6,000-capacity crowd had seen them three years earlier.
A sizable portion of those people might have been too young to attend a music festival alone back then. On Thursday at Nelsonville, Geese T-shirts were everywhere, most often on faces that looked like teenagers or in their early twenties. Among the many young fans sporting the band’s merch, a pair of guys in matching makeshift tees caught my eye. The backs bore a goose beneath the line “CAMERON WINTER (PICTURED BELOW) TRIED TO MKULTRA ME!!” These playful shirts nod to the controversy that has further complicated Geese’s narrative in 2026.
A few months back, the gifted singer-songwriter Eliza McLamb spotted a Billboard interview in which staffers of the marketing shop Chaotic Good boasted about fueling buzz for albums—including Heavy Metal and Getting Killed—by building hundreds of fake social accounts. Not long after, Wired published a piece declaring Geese’s popularity a “psyop.” Similar profiles emerged in The Guardian and New York, always casting Winter as the emblem of this broad astroturfing moment. As someone who rode the Geese hype wave with gusto, who swooned for Getting Killed and crowned it 2025’s best album in my book, these revelations were alarming. Like many others, I wondered how much of my affection for the band was manufactured.
It’s naive to think that striking it big in the music business happens in a strictly organic fashion. When I was a sheltered kid in the ’90s, I assumed every band I found on MTV and radio had landed there solely on the strength of their popularity, when in reality some acts rose because of unseen hands nudging them into the spotlight. Marketing has always involved some degree of convincing you that a performer or product is already a sensation, and that you’re missing out. But there’s a world of difference between gently nudging a band toward mass visibility and conjuring a sensation from nothing.
I’m not certain we’ll ever confirm whether the spark that propelled Geese upward was entirely pure, but the fervor that erupted around them last year was undeniably real. By the time Getting Killed dropped in September, whatever manipulation may have helped them break through the chatter had given way to a wildfire of genuine enthusiasm. Those weren’t bots swarming the Brooklyn streets for the release show or for tour dates—I witnessed the crowd with my own eyes on the main stage Thursday. “Fake it ’til you make it” is an ancient tale, and by now people genuinely care about this band. Seeing them live reminded me that they truly deserve the attention.
Geese eased into their set, sinking into the groove with the open-ended numbers from Getting Killed, namely “Islands Of Men” and “Husbands,” before tearing into the title track and turning all that latent energy into kinetic force. The first half of “Getting Killed” hit like a wrecking crew, while the second half unraveled into a slow collapse as Winter rasped, “I am getting fuckin’ destroyed.” From there they wandered between straightforward, riff-driven scorchers from 3D Country and the more abstract, rhythm-driven explorations of the new album. They stretched “Half Real” to a sinister crawl and stretched “Au Pays du Cocaine” to a delicate beauty. When they locked in on “100 Horses,” you could hear a great deal of history coursing through the music — flashes of the Rolling Stones and Sly & the Family Stone, of Radiohead and Talking Heads, true units with odd swagger all their own.
It’s about more than Cameron Winter piloting the ship. Drummer Max Bassin pounds away with force, carving out a deep pocket while leaving room for fierce fills and detours, like an engine that shudders and reconfigures space as it runs. Dom DiGesu adds a similar playfulness to the bass, smoothly shifting from rumbling lows to melodic bursts. Emily Green hammers her guitar with uncommon intensity, throwing her body into Geese’s most discordant moments as if she’s turning up the local atmospheric pressure with every sting and scream. Joined by touring keyboardist Sam Revaz, they create a racket that breathes. I hear echoes of NYC buzz-band forebears the Strokes in Winter’s cool, inscrutable demeanor or in the guitar-bass dialogue, yet nothing about this band echoes the Strokes’ machine-like precision and rigid geometry; Geese’s music is swinging, throbbing, and volatile in its own right.
Winter seasons the surrounding commotion with a generous streak of unhinged oddness, rendering even a simple greeting like “How is everybody?” almost cartoonish. “Look at all these Colombians in one place,” he proclaimed at one point—likely a nod to Columbus, not far away? “This song’s called ‘Bow Down,’ it’s about bowing down,” he explained later, just before singing, “I was a sailor, and now I’m a boat/ I was a car, and now I’m the road/ And I was kneeling on the turnpike with an angel down my throat.” He even paused mid-song to retune his guitar during “Mysterious Love.”
They saved their biggest hits for the finale. The crowd sang along to “Taxes” with reverent devotion, a moment of relief and lift culminating as Winter declares, “You’re gonna have to nail me down.” And when “Trinidad” finally closed the night, the whole festival field was howling along, “There’s a bomb in my car!” as they let loose the night’s fiercest eruptions — a final, thunderous sprawl that washed the odd vibes away in a storm of sound.
SETLIST:
“Islands Of Men”
“Husbands”
“Getting Killed”
“Crusades”
“Mysterious Love”
“Half Real”
“2122”
“100 Horses”
“Cowboy Nudes”
“I See Myself”
“Gravity Blues”
“Cobra”
“Bow Down”
“Au Pays du Cocaine”
“Taxes”
“Trinidad”
