Interview: Geese - Issue 43

Geese - Issue Forty-Three - Reuben Cross

Illustration: Line Hachem

The road to maturity is treating Geese well. It’s often said that youthfulness keeps life exciting, and holding onto that youthfulness is the hardest part. The transition is fraught with difficulty, and clouds of confusion hang over you as you travel the winding road into that scary thing called ‘adulthood’. As they prepare for the release of their second album, ‘3D Country’, the New York quintet are embarking on that journey, but they’re doing so in a way that keeps a firm grasp on the carefree spirit that characterised their previous work. It’s startling to think that frontman Cameron Winter is still only 21 years old, as he speaks with the sagacity and knowledge of someone way beyond his years.

While debut album ‘Projector’ was a spritely yet often scrappy take on post-punk, it wore its influences proudly upon its sleeve and is best taken for what it is on face value – a band of teenagers figuring out their sound and having fun with it. With ‘3D Country’, the band have found themselves invigorated by a broader range of influences, and the three years since they recorded their previous effort have seemingly allowed Geese to evolve into a tighter and more adventurous group, squeezing elements of classic rock, Americana and gospel into a freewheeling odyssey of a record.

Since ‘3D Country’ has a lot of country themes, can you pitch the album to me as though it were a Western film rather than a record?

I guess we already made a Western with the videos we’ve put out for ‘3D Country’ and ‘Cowboy Nudes’, or the closest thing to it that we could afford. I’ll let that speak for itself. I think I went a little too far with the cowboy thing, honestly, but luckily the most ‘yeehaw’ songs are the first two singles we put out.

What made you want to touch on those themes in the first place?

The last record we did was very self-conscious and was very much about the thoughts I had in my own head at the time, and I wanted to get more existential and ambitious lyrically for this one. A lot of the songs are about that anger that I had, and I felt it was worth expressing. A little bit of my own thoughts will make it in there, but I was just drawn to it because it felt important.

From a musical perspective, what pushed you further away from the sound you had on ‘Projector’? There’s elements of you returning to your roots of being a proggier, jammier band.

I’m surprised you brought up stuff from pre-’Projector’ because nobody ever listened to that. ‘Projector’ was the most original thing we’d made up to that point, having made two or three crappily recorded projects. We were listening to bands like Preoccupations, Ought, Womenthat was our own version of that, which involved a lot of weed and synthesiser sounds. We over-produced the shit out of it, but in a good way. We rightfully got put into that post-punk bubble of bands that have the same influences as us, and while some of that is really good, it didn’t feel like what we see the band as. Our goal at the outset of this record was to make something that can’t be termed post-punk.

Prior to Partisan signing you, you were on the verge of calling it quits, right?

Yeah, we’d all been accepted into college. It was really the last possible moment that a change could have been made, and we got lucky and started getting offers.

Read the interview in full inside Issue Forty-Three. In print and online via issuu.