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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s viral-hit solo album Heavy Metal and the band\u2019s 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. \u201cOur profile has grown, but we\u2019ve gotten worse at our instruments,\u201d Winter cracked from the stage in his perpetual muppet voice, asking how many people in the fest\u2019s 6,000-capacity crowd saw them three years ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2019s merch, a couple guys in matching homemade tees caught my eye. The back of their black shirts showed a goose beneath the caption \u201cCAMERON WINTER (PICTURED BELOW) TRIED TO MKULTRA ME!!\u201d These amusing garments alluded to the controversy that has further complicated Geese\u2019s story in 2026.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/IMG_1643.jpg\")
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A few months ago, the talented singer-songwriter Eliza McLamb noticed<\/a> 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\u2019s popularity a \u201cpsyop<\/a>.\u201d Similar features emerged at The Guardian<\/a> and New York<\/a>, always with Winter as the face of this widespread astroturfing phenomenon. As someone who was happily riding the Geese hype train, who went gaga for Getting Killed<\/a> and voted it as the best album of 2025<\/a>, 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?\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s naive to believe making it big in the music biz has ever been an organic process. When I was a sheltered kid in the \u201990s, 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\u2019re missing out. But there\u2019s a big difference between nudging a band into the spotlight and inventing a sensation out of thin air.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not sure we\u2019ll ever know if the initial spark that led to Geese\u2019s 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\u2019t bots swarming the streets of Brooklyn for Geese\u2019s release show and flocking to their tour dates, and I saw the throng at the mainstage Thursday with my own eyes. \u201cFake it \u2019til you make it\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Geese eased into their set, burrowing into the groove on open-ended Getting Killed songs \u201cIslands Of Man\u201d and \u201cHusbands\u201d before ripping into the title track and turning all that potential energy kinetic. The first half of \u201cGetting Killed\u201d hit like the demolition squad, the second half like the ensuing slow collapse as Winter warbled, \u201cI am getting fuckin\u2019 destroyed.\u201d From there they bounced between relatively straightforward, riff-driven 3D Country heaters and the new album\u2019s more abstract, rhythm-based excursions. They played \u201cHalf Real\u201d extra slow and nasty, and later \u201cAu Pays du Cocaine\u201d extra slow and pretty. When they locked in on \u201c100 Horses,\u201d you could hear so much history coursing through the music \u2014 flashes of the Stones and the Family Stone, of Radiohead and Talking Heads, real units with off-kilter swagger all their own.<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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\u2019s most discordant moments as if she\u2019s 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\u2019s unflappable, inscrutable presence or the guitar-bass interplay, but there\u2019s none of the Strokes\u2019 mechanistic precision and right angles in this band\u2019s swinging, throbbing, volatile music.<\/p>\n Winter seasons all that hubbub with generous amounts of aloof weirdness, making even common patter like \u201cHow is everybody?\u201d sound cartoonish. \u201cLook at all these Colombians in one place,\u201d he bizarrely announced at one point \u2014 presumably a reference to Columbus an hour up the road? \u201cThis song\u2019s called \u2018Bow Down,\u2019 it\u2019s about bowing down,\u201d he told us later, just before singing, \u201cI 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.\u201d He was not above pausing to tune his guitar in the middle of \u201cMysterious Love.\u201d<\/p>\n They saved their biggest hits for the end. The crowd sung along to \u201cTaxes\u201d with reverence usually reserved for hymns, its verses culminating in that oh-so-satisfying moment of liftoff when Winter declares, \u201cYou\u2019re gonna have to nail me down.\u201d And when \u201cTrinidad\u201d inevitably closed things out, they had the whole festival ground howling, \u201cThere\u2019s a bomb in my car!\u201d as they launched into the harshest eruptions of the night \u2014 one last clamorous sprawl passing through like a thunderstorm, washing the weird vibes away.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n SETLIST:
\u201cIslands Of Men\u201d
\u201cHusbands\u201d
\u201cGetting Killed\u201d
\u201cCrusades\u201d
\u201cMysterious Love\u201d
\u201cHalf Real\u201d
\u201c2122\u201d
\u201c100 Horses\u201d
\u201cCowboy Nudes\u201d
\u201cI See Myself\u201d
\u201cGravity Blues\u201d
\u201cCobra\u201d
\u201cBow Down\u201d
\u201cAu Pays du Cocaine\u201d
\u201cTaxes\u201d
\u201cTrinidad\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/NMF-Geese-Thurs-8.jpg\")
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