Geese’s leading man, Cam Winter, is shaking up the indie-alt scene with his debut solo project, “Heavy Metal.”
Winter’s work with his band Geese, which my roommate aptly summed up as “The 1997 Hercules theme music,” is a far cry from his new solo album. The classic Geese characteristics — anthemic power ballads that feel influenced by gospel and classic rock — do not jump out and grab you on “Heavy Metal.”
His solo record takes after Bon Iver, Mark Kozelek and Rufus Wainwright, but mostly, it’s created its own space. A roomy, comfortable but unfamiliar space. It feels fresh, new and alive — like some weird fungus taking over the indie garden, but no one’s mad about it. On the first track, “Rolling Stones,” he professes, “I’m swimming alone.” Not only apart from his band but off by himself in some other personal ocean of sonic experiments, far removed from his contemporaries.
Tracks often start slowly. Softly, his voice emerges, lyric-forward in the mix, and then his voice falls into the pit of the perfectly blurred as the track builds. It’s an ugly mess of keyboards, bass and string instruments. The songs all feel like catharsis, like a deep breath in and then an angry release again.
The album feels deeply personal to Winter, while the lyrics are abstract and poetic, the tracks are nuanced and internal. A beautiful look inward, a meditation of self-discovery, a feeling that becomes actualized with his fourth track, “Drinking Age,” a symbol of letting go of adolescence. “I know what I’m gonna be,” he continues. “I’m a piece of meat.” It’s how it feels to leap into the abyss of adulthood while simultaneously acknowledging your mortality and irrelevance.
Pitchfork uncharacteristically gave Winter’s work an 8.3 and deemed it the “best new music.”
Much like Pitchfork, The New York Times recently profiled the 22-year-old, calling him “on the verge of rock stardom” — a claim not quite backed by his Spotify streams but seemingly confirmed by the general response on Twitter.
Each track feels perfectly busy. While certainly stripped down compared to his work with Geese, the album still maintains a buzzing that lingers in the floorboards and lifts your feet to tap along. And that voice, the guttural, throaty release. He embodies every lyric and instrumental.
With the twinkling piano and the buzzing violins, each instrument feels beautifully messy and raw. Every song feels carefully crafted and meticulously mapped out, taking you on a strange journey. They wind and bend out of tune and sprawl backward into that familiar buzz, which quickly begins to feel like home. Like that one chord, that realignment of the song’s spine that feels comfortably ugly and enigmatically unfamiliar.
The 22-year-old has created something that makes me feel equally as insignificant as it does inspire me. And maybe that’s the point of great art, of truly original art. We’re equally in awe, dumbstruck and jaw-dropped, staring into the eyes of a masterpiece too large to wrap your arms around and inspiration becomes a river, like those rushing, sobbing strings all together at the end of the record. The only thing you can do is feel compelled to stand up and jump head first in some direction, hoping it brings you to a similar nirvana.
It’s 2025, and on the last track, Cameron Winter wants to tell you that “God is real. ” Maybe you’ll find it in his new album, or maybe you’ll just find that great art is real and alive, too, and it exists in the heart of his “Heavy Metal.”