Artist of the Month is an accolade given to an up-and-coming artist or group who is poised for the big time. In November 2021, we give the nod to Brooklyn post-rockers Geese as they drop their highly buzzed debut album, Projector. (Editor’s Note: If you’re having trouble viewing the player above, watch it on YouTube.)
Everyone’s been robbed of in-person experiences on way or another in this unprecedented pandemic era. Many already-plugged-in teenage musicians have seen some of their most formative years shunted online. For every breakout success spurred by TikTok, there’s a dozen more who haven’t been so lucky. How does an aspiring 16-year-old artist, for example, expand their horizons when live music is shuttered? How can they possibly hone their stage presence without stages on which to perform?
“I remember for a minute in quarantine, we would just get together and watch live videos together,” says Gus Green, guitarist for Consequence’s November Artist of the Month, Geese. “There’s a lot of YouTube rabbit holes.”
Geese are living the Gen Z life while putting New York City guitar bands back on the radar for what feels like the first time since years. When you hear about musicians born in the early 2000s, people who view the ’80s the way millennials did the ’60s, you may expect genreless hybrids of drowsy synths, half-rapped verses, and algorithm-friendly emo hooks. There are the ’90s indebted Snail Mails and pop-punk-reviving Meet Me @ the Altars out there, but few make references to Television, Yes, and Pink Floyd like Geese do.
Whereas bands of decades past may have come acts like these by spinning their older family members’ CDs and vinyl, Geese discovered them the new fashioned way. “You can find some really crazy stuff if you just kinda dig through Spotify, suggested artists and playlists and Discover Weeklies,” says Green. Then there’s guitarist Foster Hudson, who was challenged by a music instructor to explore a new album every day for a month; he went for the overachieving goal of a record a day for a year.
Before speaking with Consequence, the band members are crammed on the roughly treated couch in Green and Hudson’s shared Brooklyn apartment. Thee Oh See’s 2008 Thee Hounds of Foggy Notion plays via the Roku TV. Geese’s manager seems turned off by the “methy” sounds coming from John Dwyer’s band, but his charges are loving it.
These kids are hungry for music in a Freaks and Geeks and High Fidelity sort of way, although instead of consuming as fans, they’re absorbing as students. In fact, each member got involved in music through School of Rock “or the equivalent.” (Green, vocalist Cameron Winter, and drummer Max Bassin went to the Park Slope Rock School — “The superior program,” jokes Green.)
Hudson notes that while these afterschool programs sparked their investment in “starting to play music and listening to music actively,” their initial influences came from their parents.
Geese, photo by Ben Kaye
“My dad is a composer for sync, so he does advertisements and stuff like that,” says Winter. “He was the one who gave me all of his secondhand music equipment, and that’s how I started trying to make my own music in eight grade or ninth grade. I probably wouldn’t have gotten into it without him.”
Green’s dad also passed on his gear from his days in bands, and high school years of “fucking around in our bedrooms making shitty beats” eventually led to Geese’s debut album, Projector. Recorded in a basement studio cheekily called The Nest, the LP is full of angular guitar battles and multi-movement melodies. There are lyrics written from the perspective of a “night-crawling junkie/incel” and “a Bohemian serial killer” (according to Winter’s Track by Track breakdown). Where those less versed in the study of sounds might have failed to wrangle the kineticism, the members of Geese possesses a deftness greatly belying their ages.
Yet for as impressive as it is, the project was recorded largely for fun, something the band could look back on fondly once they went their separate ways to prestigious collegiate music programs. At best, maybe it would gain a cult following that would spark some real interest. Unexpectedly, the industry response came immediately after they released the first single, “Low Era,” online.
The track has threads of David Byrne, harmonies of Television, and four-on-the-floor grooves, a “dancier” cut than anything else on Projector, but evidence of the band’s out-of-time penchants. Listen to the way Winter sings the lines, “Modern magazines and holy scriptures/ My play rehearsals all go unheard” as Dom DiGesu’s bass lines slink through Bassin’s funky rhythms: delicate, intriguing, world-building.
The track blew up naturally — without the TikTok boost afforded many pandemic career-starters — and Geese were soon fielding offers from respected indie labels like 4AD and Sub Pop. The pandemic afforded them some extra time to consider where they’d place their future, with most of the members choosing to take a gap year instead of heading to college. (Foster completed his freshman classes, though he’s taking time off to support Projector and see where Geese goes.) Eventually, they went with hometown favorites Partisan Records.
“It was a long process of vetting and choosing labels,” says Winter. “We spoke to Tim Putnam, who’s the head of A&R at Partisan, and he wasn’t blowing smoke. He just seemed like he really believed in the music and he believes in our potential as music makers. And he was of a label that was from Brooklyn, and was giving us everything we asked for on day one.”
To go from “releasing an album for fun” at the age of 18 to signing with a label willing to support and not control — all in the midst of a pandemic — is a dream. At the same time, also because of COVID, there’s an interesting wrinkle: Having barely played a handful fo concerts, they’re soon heading out on a multi-month tour.
Geese, photo by Ben Kaye
“It’s been interesting because Geese has definitely not played a lot of shows,” admits Hudson. “But the afterschool programs we were in, we played a lot of shows through those. So we’ve had a lot of show experience, but it’s just been like playing Led Zeppelin songs in front of 15 parents. It’s definitely different, but I think we all have a baseline of being used to being on stage in some capacity.”
“I take cues out of Foster’s book, really,” Green says of their own stage presence, adding that the band also digests King Gizzard live shows on YouTube. “We would always do this high school talent show, and how he acts on stage now, it was pretty much exactly the same, but when he was in 10th grade in front of a bunch of school people. It was hilarious.”
Geese recently got to test their stage chops at their first music festival gig, Atlanta’s Shaky Knees. For Hudson, it was “surreal” to go from being a “nerdy music fan” at a fest to being able to “walk around and go places [because] I have a cool wristband… It’s not a situation I ever would have expected myself to be in.”
Meanwhile, for DiGesu, it was a fresh experience entirely. “I think for me and Cameron, it was the first festival we’ve ever been to,” he recalls. “So as excited as we were to play, I was trying to see all the acts. I was excited for everybody there, not only us.”
And that again hints at these upstarts’ relative inexperience. Prior to Hudson joining and the creation of Projector, they’d released a full-length and an EP as a four-piece. Both have since been scrubbed from the Internet; Green states bluntly that if asked, he’ll “give you the download and I don’t really care what you do with it.” Bassin adds the caveat, “You don’t get it unless you know the name of the album. If you ask for just ‘album number one,’ it doesn’t exist.”
They collectively agree that first LP wasn’t up to snuff, an embarrassing attempt by a bunch of fledgling 16-year-olds. Then again, Projector came out of them largely at 18. It’s an album filled with the anticipated teenage angst, but presented with structure you’d expect from someone who at least saw the 1990s. The fact that Geese are so sheepish about that first effort yet put together such a compelling formal debut just a few years later portends some fascinating music to come.
“We’ve been definitely working on a lot of new material this past year,” reveals Green. “And a lot of that was still in the basement and without a bunch of outside supervision and whatnot, but just having the added resources from Partisan is going to be really great, getting more takes and more collaborators.” Asked if they’ve already begun working with anyone new, he coyly teases, “Potentially.”
It’s not that there’s never been a band like Geese; their influences are clear enough whether hearing them talk or play. They’re as plugged in as anyone else in their generation, only they’re using different ports and extracting different data. Other Gen Z up-and-comers may build off of the sounds being passed back and forth on social media; Geese are using those same resources to investigate the icons of their local scene. As a result, we may be witnessing a new vanguard of NYC, led by a group of 19-year-olds who are just getting started.
As Green jokes, “Just wait till we scrub Projector from the Internet two albums later.”
Catch Geese on tour; tickets to their upcoming gigs are available via Ticketmaster.
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