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They’re so loose because they’re so tight. When Geese take the stage, they don’t re-create their recordings. It barely even feels like they’re performing songs with a defined structure — more like summoning a familiar sequence of chords and lyrics from the ether, whipping around riffs and fills like a marionette’s appendages. It’s the kind of free-flowing organized chaos that can only come from a hard-won mind-meld, from years spent coming of age together, instruments in hand. Underneath everything else, Geese have that going for them: They play like a single virtuosic organism.
This was my main takeaway from seeing the world’s buzziest indie band in action Thursday night. Geese were headlining the Nelsonville Music Festival, a sustainably small-scale treasure that’s been gathering an NPR-friendly assortment of local and global talents in rural southeast Ohio for the past 25 years. Nestled near Hocking College and just down the road from Ohio University in Athens, NMF almost feels too humble for a band that has blown up to Geese’s scope. It’s a world-class music festival that operates more like a community gathering. One of the side stages is in the middle of the woods at the bottom of a hill, with a designated hammock zone in the viewing area. Until his death last year, cult-favorite folkie Michael Hurley traveled annually to Nelsonville from his home in Oregon, serving as the fest’s animating spirit. Tim Peacock and his team have no intention of becoming the next Coachella. Yet they consistently wrangle world-renowned performers for their pastoral get-together.
Thursday at Snow Fork, Geese took the stage directly after fellow generational stars Wednesday, the climax of a playbill that also boasted Big Freedia, Saintseneca, Anna Tivel, the Magic Tuber Stringband, and much more. NMF 2026 still has two more 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 still to come. But the first night of the fest was inevitably all about Geese.
Geese played Nelsonville in 2023 when they were touring their wonderfully perverse classic rock sendup 3D Country. Back then, they seemed like one idiosyncratic young rock band among many. Now, in the wake of Cameron Winter’s viral-hit solo album Heavy Metal and the band’s zeitgeist-defining masterpiece Getting Killed, they were returning as conquering royalty, the act that broke containment to become the most widely celebrated, hotly debated indie band in years. “Our profile has grown, but we’ve gotten worse at our instruments,” Winter cracked from the stage in his perpetual muppet voice, asking how many people in the fest’s 6,000-capacity crowd saw them three years ago.
A decent chunk of those people might not have been old enough to attend a music festival unsupervised back then. Thursday at Nelsonville, Geese T-shirts were omnipresent, mostly worn by people who looked like they were in their teens or early twenties. Among the many young fans wearing the band’s merch, a couple guys in matching homemade tees caught my eye. The back of their black shirts showed a goose beneath the caption “CAMERON WINTER (PICTURED BELOW) TRIED TO MKULTRA ME!!” These amusing garments alluded to the controversy that has further complicated Geese’s story in 2026.
A few months ago, the talented singer-songwriter Eliza McLamb noticed a Billboard interview in which employees of the marketing agency Chaotic Good bragged about building buzz for albums including Heavy Metal and Getting Killed by manufacturing hundreds of fake social media accounts. Soon, Wired published a report declaring Geese’s popularity a “psyop.” Similar features emerged at The Guardian and New York, always with Winter as the face of this widespread astroturfing phenomenon. As someone who was all aboard the Geese hype train, who went gaga for Getting Killed and voted it as the best album of 2025, these were alarming allegations. Like many, I believed I was watching the inspiring rise of my favorite new band. How much of my affection was the product of manipulation?
It’s naive to believe making it big in the music biz has ever been an organic process. When I was a sheltered kid in the ’90s, I assumed every band I discovered on MTV and the radio had ended up there because of their massive popularity, when in fact some of them became popular because some invisible hand had pushed them onto MTV and the radio. Marketing has always involved an element of convincing you that this person or product is already a sensation, and you’re missing out. But there’s a big difference between nudging a band into the spotlight and inventing a sensation out of thin air.
I’m not sure we’ll ever know if the initial spark that led to Geese’s ascension was genuine, but the fervor that broke out around them last year was extremely real. By the time Getting Killed dropped in September, whatever fakery might have helped this band break through the noise had given way to an inferno of authentic enthusiasm. Those weren’t bots swarming the streets of Brooklyn for Geese’s release show and flocking to their tour dates, and I saw the throng at the mainstage Thursday with my own eyes. “Fake it ’til you make it” is a tale as old as time, and at this point people really care about this band. Seeing them in concert was a reminder that they merit our attention.
Geese eased into their set, burrowing into the groove on open-ended Getting Killed songs “Islands Of Man” and “Husbands” before ripping into the title track and turning all that potential energy kinetic. The first half of “Getting Killed” hit like the demolition squad, the second half like the ensuing slow collapse as Winter warbled, “I am getting fuckin’ destroyed.” From there they bounced between relatively straightforward, riff-driven 3D Country heaters and the new album’s more abstract, rhythm-based excursions. They played “Half Real” extra slow and nasty, and later “Au Pays du Cocaine” extra slow and pretty. When they locked in on “100 Horses,” you could hear so much history coursing through the music — flashes of the Stones and the Family Stone, of Radiohead and Talking Heads, real units with off-kilter swagger all their own.
It’s so much more than the Cameron Winter show up there. Drummer Max Bassin plays hard and heavy, creating a deep pocket yet finding space for gnarly fills and detours aplenty, like a sputtering engine that can bend the space-time continuum. Dom DiGesu brings a similar flair to the bass, shifting intuitively from a low-end rumble to bursts of melody. Emily Green wrangles her guitar with an uncommon intensity, throwing her body into Geese’s most discordant moments as if she’s personally cranking up the local barometric pressure with each stab and squall. Along with touring keyboardist Sam Revaz, they make a racket that breathes. I get why people sometimes hear echoes of NYC buzz-band forebears the Strokes in Winter’s unflappable, inscrutable presence or the guitar-bass interplay, but there’s none of the Strokes’ mechanistic precision and right angles in this band’s swinging, throbbing, volatile music.
Winter seasons all that hubbub with generous amounts of aloof weirdness, making even common patter like “How is everybody?” sound cartoonish. “Look at all these Colombians in one place,” he bizarrely announced at one point — presumably a reference to Columbus an hour up the road? “This song’s called ‘Bow Down,’ it’s about bowing down,” he told us 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 was not above pausing to tune his guitar in the middle of “Mysterious Love.”
They saved their biggest hits for the end. The crowd sung along to “Taxes” with reverence usually reserved for hymns, its verses culminating in that oh-so-satisfying moment of liftoff when Winter declares, “You’re gonna have to nail me down.” And when “Trinidad” inevitably closed things out, they had the whole festival ground howling, “There’s a bomb in my car!” as they launched into the harshest eruptions of the night — one last clamorous sprawl passing through like a thunderstorm, washing the weird vibes away.
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”
English (US) · 