New Year is set to be year of American rock band Geese

Louis Chilton, The Independent

You've heard of the Year of the Rat, or the Year of the Snake — but what about the Year of the Geese? We may just be on the precipice of it. Ever since the release of their genre-bending album, Getting Killed, in September, the ascendant rock band Geese have rocketed from outsider curiosity to fervid, ubiquitous hype object. The Brooklyn-formed four-piece are inspiring the sort of fulsome fanfare that comes around once in a generation. While Gen Z are hardly short of success stories — Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Lola Young, Olivia Dean, Addison Rae and Gracie Abrams have shot to superstardom in the pop or pop-adjacent spheres — it's been a notably more arid state of affairs when it comes to rock bands. Geese, with their 23-year-old frontman and figurehead Cameron Winter, might be the first to truly take flight.

It has helped, of course, that Geese arrived at Getting Killed not as rough-edged newcomers but as a tight-knit unit with nearly a decade of graft behind them. The band had put out three albums before, of steadily increasing confidence and ambition, while Winter released his own acclaimed solo album, Heavy Metal, late last year. What this means is that while Getting Killed has the biting freshness of a band we're still getting to know, there is a brash, experimental assuredness to it that many acts don't find until decades into their oeuvre. The album saunters through riffy guitar-led numbers, unvarnished, wailing ballads, and spacey funk, all girded by the group's dextrous rhythmic flourishes and Winter's precise, angsty lyrics.

Assessing Getting Killed for The Independent's Best of 2025 list (on which it placed at number five), Roisin O'Connor described the album as "surreal, dark and absurd". Winter's singing, she wrote, is "a slouchy, slurred warble that evokes Thom Yorke's lupine howl one moment, Mick Jagger's guttural bark the next". Pretty much everywhere you look, you'll find similarly effusive praise for Getting Killed; dissenters have been a small and drowned-out minority. The Washington Post's Chris Richards suggested last month that Geese are "both good and overhyped", claiming that "no band has occupied these crosscurrents so comfortably since the Strokes".

Of all the comparisons to have been made about Geese — and there have been a hell of a lot, with Winter likened to everyone from Bob Dylan to Leonard Cohen to Tom Waits — it is The Strokes that is perhaps the most telling. Winter is pretty much the same age as Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas when Is This It propelled the indie rockers to fame in 2001, and has about him the same sense of conspicuous, unmanicured cool. There are times when Winter's singing passingly evokes their fellow New Yorkers, in a sort of soulful, dictionless way. Musically, though, the comparison only goes so far: Geese have already demonstrated considerably more formal range than their Noughties-era counterparts, perhaps just without the Casablancan knack for a truly infectious hook.

It's revealing, though, that critics are feeling moved to reach back a quarter of a century to find a point of comparison; it speaks in part to how few truly exciting rock bands have emerged since the 2000s indie glut. In the past few years, bands such as Fontaines DC and Wet Leg have found considerable success with a guitar-led sound. Just where Geese fits into this loose rock revival movement - at the cutting edge of it, or marauding around the outskirts - remains to be seen. It's important to be level-headed about the magnitude of Geese's moment: despite their critical-darling status, the band are without a traditional breakout "hit". Their 1.9 million monthly listeners on Spotify is nothing to be scoffed at, but does limit what can truly be read into their mainstream importance.

Nonetheless, it's hard not to see the last few months as a tipping point. Last weekend, the (thoroughgoingly mainstream) US variety series Saturday Night Live directly parodied "Cameron Winter from Geese" — a notion that would have seemed preposterous even half a year ago. Winter has ended this year with a run of high-profile solo gigs, including at London's Roundhouse and the Palace Theatre in Los Angeles.