Geese

School friends in a Fort Greene basement

Geese formed in 2016 while its members were still at school in Brooklyn, between Brooklyn Friends School and the Little Red School House, and rehearsed in drummer Max Bassin's basement in Fort Greene. Their first album, A Beautiful Memory, came out in 2018, two years before any label was involved. Partisan Records and Play It Again Sam signed the band in 2020.

The line-up that tours now is Cameron Winter on lead vocals, keyboards and guitar, Emily Green on guitar, Dominic DiGesu on bass and Bassin on drums, with Sam Revaz added as a touring keyboard player. Foster Hudson played guitar from 2019 until December 2023, when he left to return to studying. The reference points attached to the band have stayed fairly constant — the Velvet Underground, Television, the Strokes, Radiohead — which undersells how little their four records sound like each other.

Projector, 3D Country and a sideways step

Projector arrived in 2021 and was read, reasonably, as a post-punk record. 3D Country, released on 23 June 2023 through Partisan and Play It Again Sam, moved them out of that bracket. James Ford produced it, much of it was recorded at The Diamond Mine in Queens, and its loose narrative follows an uptight cowboy through a psychedelic desert. It carried a Metacritic average of 78 from six reviews, reached number 30 on the UK Independent Albums chart, and placed 35th on Rolling Stone's list of the best indie-rock albums of 2023. A companion EP of session material, 4D Country, followed in October 2023. It was Hudson's last album with the group.

The step that actually shifted their standing was not a band record at all. Winter released a solo album, Heavy Metal, in December 2024, and it lifted the profile of Geese more than 3D Country had managed.

Getting Killed and the year it won

Getting Killed, their fourth album, came out on 26 September 2025. It was recorded in January 2025 at Kenneth Blume's Putnam Hill studio in Los Angeles, with Blume producing, and four singles trailed it: Taxes, Trinidad, 100 Horses, and the Au Pays du Cocaine / Cobra pairing.

The reviews were close to unanimous. Metacritic logged 89 from nineteen notices, Pitchfork gave it Best New Music, and both The New Yorker and Stereogum placed it first on their albums of 2025. What critics kept returning to was the range inside single tracks — Winter dropping from a low croon into a strained, cracking shout, with jazz, funk and noise pulled into art rock without much warning.

Commercially it behaved like a word-of-mouth record rather than a chart event. It reached number 96 on the Billboard 200 and topped the UK Independent Albums chart. In Britain it entered at 26 and then re-entered the top 40 later, the shape of a record that keeps selling after release week. Music Week reported 55,875 UK sales shortly before it was certified Silver at the 60,000 mark.

A BRIT Award, then an argument about marketing

Geese won International Group at the BRIT Awards in February 2026, their first major industry prize. Six weeks later, on 14 April, Wired published a piece headlined "The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop", reporting that their rise had involved Chaotic Good Projects, a digital marketing firm whose pitch covered agency-run fan pages and algorithmic promotion, and whose named clients also included Mk.gee and Oklou.

The argument that followed was mostly about whether it mattered. No official statement from the band or the label appeared in the coverage. Fans called it clickbait, and the recurring line in their defence was that artificial platforming only carries a record so far if the songs do not hold up. Writers covering the row pointed out that agency-run fan pages are standard industry practice rather than something Geese invented, and one journalist noted that their London show had the best atmosphere of any large-scale gig she had been to in years. The touring schedule was unaffected: eight further North American dates were added that same month, and the full autumn run went on sale on 1 May 2026.

Where things stand now

Partisan re-signed the band in 2026 for a further two albums. Jeff Bell, the label's VP and head of UK, said the deal was agreed in Tokyo and that rival labels had been circling first; Partisan took Independent Record Company at the Music Week Awards the same year. Festival billing has followed the chart position, with a headline slot at End of the Road and a main-stage appearance at Reading and Leeds.

Winter's solo work is running in parallel and is the clearest indicator of what comes next. His December 2025 concert at Carnegie Hall became a live album released on 9 October 2026, and Paul Thomas Anderson directed a concert film of that performance which tours cinemas from November 2026 into January 2027. Speaking to Rolling Stone in September 2026, Winter said the studio follow-up to Heavy Metal was proving hard: he had drifted into simpler chord progressions he thought were getting worse, and had stopped playing the new material to people because most of those who heard it had not liked it. Bassin's account was that Winter is working extremely hard on it regardless.

The tour as it stands

The Getting Killed World Tour has run across five legs and 86 shows since October 2025, covering North America, Europe, the Pacific and Asia, with the rooms scaling up as it went — Brooklyn Paramount, the Hammersmith Apollo, the Ryman Auditorium. Resale was a running problem: tickets sold at face value were reappearing between $300 and $1,000, and the band partnered with CashorTrade on the North American dates to push some stock back towards face value. Openers across the legs have included Iceage, Julianna Barwick, Leenalchi and billy woods, rotating by date rather than running the whole tour.

The closing leg, billed as Getting Killed Again, opened on 28 September 2026 at the Ryman in Nashville, the first of two sold-out nights there, and runs through November. The eight dates added in April were second nights in Oakland, Seattle, Chicago, Toronto, Philadelphia and Washington DC plus a third in Los Angeles, across venues including Hollywood Forever Cemetery, the Salt Shed, HISTORY in Toronto and The Anthem. The two nights at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens on 2 and 3 October were the largest headline shows the band has played.