Geese: Rock Is Dead. Long Live Rock.

photo: Daniel Topete

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It’s a scene straight out of a blog post from the early aughts: Three members of the uber-buzzy indie-rock band Geese are sitting in a bar located just above the Lorimer Street stop in the heart of Williamsburg. Guitarist Foster Hudson and drummer Max Bassin are chatting about a show they are scheduled to play in Staten Island—a rarity even for a New York-bred band. They order some drinks and settle back into a booth next to introspective singer Cameron Winter, who is in the middle of connecting the dots between some classic shows he saw with his bandmates in high school and their own upcoming headlining spot at Brooklyn club Warsaw.

As is the case with many young TikTok-era musicians or music fans, the conversation is fast-paced and stylistically open-minded. There’s banter about sharing a bike lock, how the G Train never shows up on time and if anyone they know has actually been to Hudson Yards, a recently redesigned neighborhood they are slated to play in June.

The musicians, who are still in their early 20s, have gathered on this May afternoon to discuss their second full-length LP, 3D Country, which is slated for release in June. They are all also acutely aware that it is not the early aughts and that the Brooklyn musical landscape has changed quite a bit during the past decade and a half—especially since March of 2020. With that in mind, it makes sense that 3D Country is a volcanic, kaleidoscopic mix of heavily filtered classic rock, wild crooner punk and, yes, three-dimensional country, which feels both self-referential and timeless.

“Everyone was listening to different stuff, pulling from different places,” Bassin says, almost immediately brushing off any notions that their breakthrough LP, 2021’s Projector “saved” New York’s once vibrant arts scene during the pandemic. “Cameron was thinking of these songs from a Ween perspective; Foster and I were thinking about them like they were Zeppelin-y, Rolling Stones-y. When we did Projector, we would just sit together in my basement, listening to music and talking.”

“A lot of those songs on Projector have been around since 2019,” Hudson adds, before citing one of their signature tracks. “When we were making the new record, we said, ‘I’ve heard “Disco” so many times, I just wanna make anything that doesn’t sound like that.’”

“I remember queuing up some Ween for you,” Winter says, gesturing to Bassin. “You were like, ‘What’s this?’ And then you were like, ‘Now, what’s this?’ And I was like, ‘Dude, it’s still Ween.’ I could see that wonderful moment when Max’s perception of Ween went from a joke band to an actual band.” (Fun fact: Gene Ween’s daughter used to babysit Bassin when he was younger.)

Geese—whose lineup also includes bassist Dominic DiGesu and guitarist Gus Green—started working on 3D Country shortly after turning in Projector, which they began crafting in high school. With COVID still flaring up, the outfit’s tour schedule was sparse so they decided to start plugging away at their follow-up release. “We wrote songs, rewrote songs and then wrote new songs for a year and a half,” Hudson says. “With Projector, we usually went with the first or second draft of a song. There weren’t many major structural changes between when Cameron would come in with an idea or a framework for a song and when we would record it. This time, we just had so much time to play with them.”  

Before entering Queens, N.Y.’s Diamond Mind studio for three weeks of tracking, the quintet compiled their demos into a 12-song list and initially started recording the tunes in that order. But then, Winter pulled up a roulette wheel on his computer for some creative inspiration, letting fate and technology decide what they were going to tackle each day. “You can hear the wheel,” he says. “We lived by that wheel. We spun it every day.”

They also made a point to massage their influences out of certain cuts. “We redid the entire second act of ‘Cowboy Nudes’ to make it less classic rock,” Hudson says, also noting that when they played 3D Country opener “2122” live on tour, some fans asked them who they were covering. “I like to call that riff in the second half ‘the carousel riff’ or ‘the circus-freak riff.’”

“‘Fantasies’ went through three different phases of recording,” Bassin interjects. “We sat on it, tried to redo it again and again and, ultimately, settled on the [arrangement].”

At times, the music almost feels post-apocalyptic in a post-pandemic way, though 3D Country, by and large, is cleaner and crisper than their debut.

“A lot of music that has social commentary in it tends to be very dour, and that approach works for a lot of artists who make great music,” Hudson says. “But for us, it was a little bit about trying to find a way to coexist with this horrible future and reality that it seems like we’re being sold every day—it’s trying to embrace the doom and find positivity in it. It’s like, ‘Well, we’re all gonna die a horrible death—might as well have fun while we’re still here and not dying a horrible death.’”

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Geese first gained national attention during the depths of the pandemic, though the five musicians’ friendships date back much further. DiGesu, Hudson and Green studied at Manhattan’s The Little Red School House & Elisabeth Irwin High School, Bassin and Winter attended Brooklyn Friends, and Hudson, Winter and Green participated in the same School of Rock program in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood. They all consider themselves products of the city’s various school systems.

“I had to interview as a three year old to get into Brooklyn Friends School, Packer and Berkeley Carroll,” Bassin says with a hearty chuckle, rattling off a few of the city’s elite preschool programs. “And Berkeley Carroll was like, ‘He doesn’t vibe with the rest of the kids.’” 

“Yeah, this three-year-old kid doesn’t have what it take,” Hudson quips.

As budding players, they bonded over Pink Floyd, Yes and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, and jammed in Bassin’s family basement—as long as they promised to unplug before their neighbors went to sleep.

“When I started high school at Little Red, the first person I talked to was Gus because he was wearing an LCD Soundsystem T-shirt,” Hudson says. “But then he started talking about American football or something.”

DiGesu, Green, Winter and Bassin eventually formed what would become Geese as teenagers, spending their weekends practicing in the latter musicians’ basement, which they called The Nest. They selected the name Geese as a play on Green’s nickname, Goose.

“We never really got into covers—we were always writing our own stuff,” Winter says. “We were just in Max’s basement, making these long, shitty songs.”

“We all liked doing that much more than we liked doing homework,” Hudson adds.

For the first few years they were together, Geese was primarily a recording project; they dropped a few early recordings, all of which they no longer consider part of their official canon. However, they rarely played live.

“We had so much anxiety about playing live,” Bassin says. “There’s a lot of stuff you can’t really control.”

Geese made their onstage debut as Opolis at Brooklyn’s Bar Chord in 2017, and Hudson, who was going to school in New Jersey at the time, eventually signed on, playing live with the band for the first time in January 2020.

“It was like a month and a half before everything shut down,” Hudson says. “That was the first show right after we had written a lot of the Projector songs.”

Cameron, who still keeps an easily accessible list of every single Geese show on his phone, says that the group played about five gigs before COVID-19 crippled the live-music world, depending on what you consider a concert. That includes a youth program event at The Met of all places. “It was a weird thing—it’s less cool than it sounds,” he says. “Sometimes we would get a Spotify Wrapped sent to us from someone in Japan and that blew our minds. And then we put out [future Projector cuts] ‘Low Era’ and ‘Bottle’ and we got DM’d by our now manager.”

“We put up an early mix of ‘Low Era,’” Hudson says, picking up the story. “Pretty much anybody who DM’d us and said they were anybody, we thought was a big deal. He connected us with our lawyer and then, after that, everything snowballed really fast.”

“March happened and we all finished high school online,” Bassin says. “And we also started having all these conversations with labels.”

While they were still weighing college options, the group became the subject of an indie bidding war. In fact, the first time some of the members of Geese left their homes during the quarantine was to film a video for Matador Records at Winter’s house.

“They wanted to see if we could play live,” the singer says. “COVID actually probably helped us get signed. We sucked so bad. They would’ve lost interest instantly.”

“We missed out on a lot of free dinners,” Hudson says. “There was a three-month stretch when I would meet with my school advisor and then, two hours later, I’d be on a Zoom call with a bunch of label people. We would all FaceTime afterward and be like, ‘What is going on?’”

The musicians eventually all agreed to forgo college and signed with indie tastemakers Partisan Records. The band’s early buzz drew comparisons to fellow New York guitar-rock revivalists like The Strokes and Parquet Courts, helping them score choice clips in major publications and praise for playing rock-and-roll in the era of pop and hip-hop.

At the same time, the members of Geese were still living with their parents, trying to make sense of their newfound fame.

“It was a very odd period of time because we had all this success and attention, but there was no tangibility to it,” Hudson says. “My life was small at that period of time. I was just in my bedroom writing poetry and waiting for my life to start; meanwhile, all this stuff was suddenly happening to the band that I don’t think any of us ever thought would’ve really happened.”

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Despite possessing a deep knowledge of rock-and-roll history and nodding to a mix of influences from well before they were born, Geese are a true product of the 21st century. They all still live in various pockets of Brooklyn—or sections of Brooklyn that are so deep on the L line that they are technically in Queens—and channel their hometown’s renewed energy and intellect in their music. Yet they don’t feel tied to any specific scene or club in the way that their musical heroes were.

“A lot of what Geese is about is the fact that we live in an age where you can just listen to so much music on your phone,” Hudson says. “3D Country is the breadth of all the music that we listen to just because we can. I can pull up every Rolling Stones album, every Led Zeppelin album on my phone.”

The guitarist is also acutely aware that he and his bandmates came of age at a time when the rock-and-roll dream had already been deflated numerous times, only to be inflated once again a few years later by the next city or scene. That being said, due to the pandemic and modern recording mediums, the members of Geese still see the pull of the remote world.

“We’re all pretty introverted so I don’t know if we’re a good litmus test for what the scene is like out there but, at least for me, a lot of the bands that we’ve been compared to—Squid, Black Midi, Black Country—are happening in Europe,” Hudson says. “A lot of these scenes coalesced on the internet, whereas with grunge in Seattle or even 20 years ago, these bands were all making music together and playing the same clubs.”

In mid-2021, as the live-music world started to open back up, Geese played a few warm up dates around New York before heading across the pond for a proper tour. They all look to King Gizzard, in particular, as a band who was able to successfully bounce from psych-garage rock to high-art projects and trash metal while maintaining a unified feel. Curiously, despite their eclectic tastes, the members of the Geese consider the Grateful Dead a bit of a blind spot, though the influential Bay Area group is still a part of their cultural zeitgeist.

“I’m not a huge Deadhead, but I had a therapist for a while who was a big Deadhead so I know some stuff,” Hudson says cheerfully.

“Like Ween, it was intimidating to get into it,” Bassin adds. “If I don’t understand it, someone will come and decapitate me for it.”

Winter says that he and his bandmates were gifted some choice Bob Weir T-shirts—as well as some pot treats— when they appeared at Mill Valley, Calif.’s Sweetwater Music Hall recently. It all helped fuel a strange gig where they were asked to play an unexpected encore. They chose Billy Joel’s “Piano Man.”

“It was anarchy,” Bassin says.

And, of course, despite their considerable indie cred and rising fame, the band feels the need to mention Goose, whose parallel ascent on the jamband circuit has caused a little disorientation.

“You would not believe how many times people have come up to us, even when we were opening for Spoon, and said, ‘I tried to buy my husband Goose tickets for his birthday, but I accidentally bought Geese instead,’” Hudson says playfully, noting that they eagerly look forward to sharing a bill with Goose at some point.

Until then, they are having some good-natured fun with the confusion. Last year, Winter went to Los Angeles for some meetings and to write with Darkside’s Dave Harrington. When the topic of Goose came up, they decided to play with the misconception, and Winter ended up sitting in with Harrington’s band Taper’s Choice—in front of a crowd that was heavy on Phish fans.

It’s all part of their overall approach and the members of Geese hope to continue to expand and fine-tune their own sound as they work on new music. Winter mentions that he has been particularly inspired by Tom Waits as of late.

“We get very restless,” Hudson says. “We like to change. We are only two records deep; though we’re writing the third record now, and the demos sound different than the last record. We constantly listen to music all the time.”