Geese Never Thought They’d End Up Here

Y
ou can find almost anything your heart desires on the grounds of the Governors Ball. Rappers, pop stars, photo ops, and brand activations fill the sunny park in Queens where tens of thousands of young New Yorkers have gathered on the first weekend in June. There are weed-soda kiosks and artisanal hot-dog trucks, and every song you hear sounds like it might be the song of the summer. But you can’t find a satisfactory cup of coffee — at least, not if you’re Geese drummer Max Bassin. That’s why, an hour or so before his band plays the main stage of their hometown’s biggest music festival, Bassin is tinkering with a $700 espresso machine in a backstage trailer.

“Max has been making coffee for the last two or three hours,” says one of about 10 friends and crew members strewn about the greenroom.

“Bro is on an eight-hour shift right now,” adds another guy.

“I’m not fucking around here!” Bassin retorts.

He’s smiling as he says it, though. Truth is, Bassin seems completely at ease, yapping away cheerfully as he hunches over the coffee apparatus in baggy black slacks and a white T-shirt that says “E Is for Evil,” stylish sunglasses propped up on his tousled hair, a small goatee gracing his chin. There’s a clear-glass bong and a grinder full of dank green bud on the table near the espresso machine, along with a carton of oat milk. Life is pretty good when you’re the drummer in the coolest rock band New York has seen in a generation.

Geese’s lead singer, Cameron Winter, is stretched out at full length on a comfortable chair in another corner of the room, gazing intently at a phone with a single large crack marring its screen. He’s dressed unassumingly in a blue button-down and black jeans, and he stays quiet as the others talk about guest-list spots and friends who might drop by later. You could almost miss him there, if he weren’t six feet three and possessed of an intense charisma that only gets more pronounced when he isn’t saying anything.

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Someone asks what happened to his phone, and Winter looks up. “It got hit by a bus,” he says.

“What?” another member of the entourage says, sounding concerned.

“My phone got hit by a bus,” Winter repeats slowly in his resonant baritone. “I dropped it in the street, and then a woman found it. She brought it back to me, and told me to be careful.”

Laughter breaks out around the frontman as he continues to tell what may or may not be some form of tall tale regarding his broken phone. Across the room, the discussion swings back to the band’s festival set. As showtime approaches, a crew member returns from having a look at the space where they’ll be performing.

“It’s a big old stage,” they report.

Bassin grins: “Well, we’re a very big band.”

THAT GEESE ARE, to a degree that has thrilled and bewildered roughly equal shares of the public for the past year, ever since their third proper album, Getting Killed, landed them smack in the middle of an indie-rock culture war. Suddenly, here was a band whose members had mastered the fundamentals of rock, to the point where they can slip a slice of Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive” into one of their live sets if they feel like it — yet also a band with enough of a stubborn experimental streak to confound any expectations you may have, over and over again. Whether they’re playing loud or soft, Geese’s music has an uncanny intensity that’s missing from so many other indie bands. And when Winter sings, in that distinctive yowl of his, you feel like you’re looking right into his tortured heart.

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Geese didn’t come out of nowhere, even if their supersonic spike in popularity has made it seem that way to some. In fact, they have been cultivating a devoted fanbase for a decade, starting practically the moment that Winter, Bassin, guitarist Emily Green, and bassist Dominic DiGesu, all now 24, started the band as teenagers. Their audience grew steadily in the years that followed. By the release of 2023’s 3D Country, their well-reviewed second album, they were close to maxing out the modest level of success that a bunch of kids playing rock music can realistically hope for today.

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Watch the video interview below

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But something else is going on now, something much more mysterious. These days, the shows are bigger and the tickets sell out in instants, filling theaters around the country with concertgoers whose response to Geese’s music can best be described as rabid ecstasy. “Oh, pipe down,” Winter coyly told a room full of people chanting “Geese! Geese! Geese!” at one sold-out New York show last fall. (The people did not pipe down.) When they played Saturday Night Live in January — treating an audience of millions to “Au Pays du Cocaine,” the most heartrending ballad on Getting Killed, followed by “Trinidad,” a.k.a. the one where Winter keeps screaming “There’s a bomb in my car!” — they became the show’s most talked-about musical guests in ages. Some of that chatter came from clueless cranks who wondered if their performance was a comedy sketch, but that’s how it goes with this band. All year long, they’ve been heatedly debated in online threads where some hail them as rock & roll saviors, and others raise doubts, in the manner of ultra-buzzy acts since time immemorial.

That last part, the way that all of this evokes a long-past era of rock fandom, is the real puzzler. These four young musicians are driving people crazy with guitar, bass, drums, and vocals — more or less the same tools the Beatles and the Stones used — and they’re doing it right now, in the 2020s. This isn’t supposed to happen anymore, but look around you and you’ll see that it is. So what the hell is going on? Is it possible that Geese are just that good?

Jack White thinks so. “Geese, to me, are a real American band, and a real New York band,” says the decorated indie vet, who’s become one of their most vocal fans. “The vibe, the attitude, and the execution all feel that way to me. I love that despite living in an era of content creators sucking the energy out of anyone who gets their head above water for even a second, they’ve captured the magical thing where people are very excited about a rock & roll band in a visceral way.… Them blowing up shows us there is hope.”

Geese started noticing their change in fortunes almost immediately after Getting Killed came out through Partisan Records on Sept. 26, 2025. The next day was a Saturday, and they marked the album’s release with a free outdoor show at a plaza in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, called Banker’s Anchor. “I was really pissed that we had to do that,” Winter tells me. “I thought no one was going to come, and we would be busking, basically.”

Suffice it to say, when the afternoon of the 27th rolled around, they were not busking. “We came in that morning, and we were like, ‘There’s going to be 500 people that show up, at the most,’” DiGesu recalls. “And then at least 2,500 people came.”

For the band at the center of it all, the sudden increase in attention was disorienting at times. “It was very scary when it was starting,” Winter says. “It didn’t feel like a good thing exactly. We didn’t really know why. I think we still don’t know why. It just feels like a weird time and place for this record to land well on a bigger scale, to be the thing that makes everyone want to buy a ticket to the show.… I don’t know. It was probably robots or something.”

Ah, yes. The bots. If you were even a little online this spring, you’ve likely heard about the more sordid and conspiratorial explanation that’s been offered for Geese’s success. The accusation first came to light in March, after two guys from a digital-marketing firm with the rather-too-perfect name Chaotic Good talked to Billboard about the services their company provides. According to these dudes, they practice something called “trend simulation” using a vast network of farmed social media accounts to boost conversation around their clients. “We can drive impressions on anything at this point,” one of them bragged. “We know how to go viral, we have thousands of pages.”

Chaotic Good took credit for campaigns pushing megastars like Coldplay and Travis Scott, but none of those names seemed to outrage people when paired with marketing-deck lingo the way Geese’s did. Maybe that’s because indie fans have a higher expectation of authenticity from their favorite acts, whatever that word means; maybe it’s because listeners felt betrayed by the suggestion that they’d been manipulated into the vulnerability they felt when they heard Winter sing about a sailor in a big green coat. Either way, the narrative around the band took a sharp turn on March 31, when singer-songwriter and podcaster Eliza McLamb posted a Substack titled “Fake Fans,” and zagged straight to hell two weeks later, when Wired published a report with the provocative headline “The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop.”

On one level, the “fake fans” charge is absurd, a nonstarter. If you’ve attended a Geese show at any point in the past year, or even seen someone’s shaky phone footage, you know that their crowds are full of actual, flesh-and-blood music enjoyers who exist on the same plane of reality as you and me. “Come to the show, man,” DiGesu tells me, sounding understandably exasperated. “Just come to the show, and fucking tell me how many bots you see.”

Winter, though, is less defensive when I ask how he felt about the assertion that his band’s breakthrough was the result of a shadowy mind-control program. “I thought the same thing, I really did,” he says, and laughs. “That seemed like a reasonable explanation.” He tells me that the debate raging around the band this spring caused major consternation inside the band, too: “We were just like, ‘Oh, my God. The whole fucking thing is fake.’ We were having a meltdown. Then we marched up to our label over email, the relevant team members, like, ‘How long have all our fuckin’ fans been fake, you sons of bitches?’”

Now, in the band’s first interview since the psyop allegations broke, they want to clear up some misconceptions about what Chaotic Good did and didn’t do for Geese. First of all: “We learned that we should show up to Zoom meetings about how our record’s going to be advertised,” Winter says. When they belatedly asked their team for an explanation, they say, they were assured that they’d only hired the company to share and repost live clips of their music, nothing else. “It wasn’t comments or fake fans or bots or anything,” Winter adds. “It was low-effort TikTok posts that were used to boost the algorithm. They showed us samples, and it made me feel better because they were so shitty.”

In other words, pretty much all of the hype around Geese was legit, believe it or not — a product of the same apparently unquenchable drive to talk about this band that, in turn, produced the backlash that followed. “I’m glad that people have thoughts about our stuff at the end of the day,” DiGesu says. “At least we’re not boring and mid.”

BUT FORGET ALL THAT BOT TALK. The secret behind this band is nothing more or less than old-fashioned human creativity, actually — a group of lifelong friends who pushed themselves and one another until they made a leap that surprised even them. Their chemistry as four musicians who understand one another’s instincts and needs is the engine behind all they’ve done.

For DiGesu, it’s easy to pinpoint the moment that set his life on its present course. It happened in September 2016, on his first day of ninth grade at Elisabeth Irwin High School, a progressive institution in downtown Manhattan that began the school year by sending its students upstate on a freshman-orientation trip. “Everyone just gets dumped off the bus,” he recalls. “No one knows each other, except for the kids that went to the middle school. So there’s all these friends already, and then there’s the stragglers, meeting everybody for the first time.”

That group of newcomers included both him and Green, who promptly introduced herself. “I was standing with this kid in the jungle-gym area,” DiGesu continues. “He was trying to do a backflip, and I was watching him. And then Emily comes over, like, ‘Yo, can I try?’ By the time we were leaving the campsite, we were sitting on the bus together.”

DiGesu chats freely as we stroll through Central Park, not far from the Upper West Side apartment where he lives with his mom and their Yorkie, Cheyenne (“like the city in Wyoming”). He’s the only Manhattanite in Geese — the other three members all grew up across the East River in Brooklyn, where they met in elementary school — and in many respects, he’s a classic New York type. “I’m very Italian. Like, 80 percent Italian,” DiGesu tells me, explaining that his mom’s family can trace its origins to “a little island off Sicily called Lipari,” while his dad’s roots go back to “a small town in Calabria called Cessaniti.”

“It was very scary when it was starting. We didn’t know why. We still don’t.”

His parents met at a Knicks game in the early Nineties, and he’s been a fan since birth. When we meet, the team is two wins away from its first NBA title in 53 years, and DiGesu is proudly rocking a vintage “Go New York, Go New York, Go” tee that his mom snagged years ago at Madison Square Garden. Really, though, he’s more of a baseball fiend, with a near-religious devotion to the New York Mets. When the team’s giant-headed mascot, Mr. Met, made a special appearance at a Geese show in Brooklyn last November, DiGesu was overcome with emotion. “I genuinely started crying,” he says.

Walking deeper into the park, DiGesu points out a spot by the lake where he and his friends used to hang out in high school. “I would get Emily to come up after school sometimes. That was fun,” he says. “We’d go to the park, smoke weed, then watch cartoons.”

More often, he took the subway out to Brooklyn, where Green, Bassin, and Winter were all enrolled in extracurricular lessons at the Park Slope Rock School. DiGesu, who’d been getting good on bass at another School of Rock program back in Manhattan, fit right in. “Emily introduced me to Max and Cam, and then all of a sudden, we were all hanging out in the basement, jamming,” he says.

The basement, a.k.a. “the Nest,” plays a mythical role in Geese’s story. That’s the sparsely furnished space underneath the Bassin family’s Fort Greene brownstone where, at age 14, the four of them began an embryonic form of the band. “We had this really dingy New York basement that had a fucked-up concrete floor,” Bassin tells me later. “My mom put up some drywall. We put some curtains up, a bunch of fabric to make the sound as dead as possible, and a bunch of carpets and lamps and shit. The vibes were pretty good.”

DiGesu, who’d grown up listening to parental faves like the Doors and Led Zeppelin, remembers his new bandmates turning him on to acts like Radiohead and Animal Collective, and how his world expanded from there. It’s a process of discovery that could have taken place in countless American basements at any point in the past three to five decades, except this group of adolescent rockers started a band that has a good shot at standing alongside those heroes when all is said and done. And if that dream seemed unlikely back then, DiGesu is doing his best to get used to it now that it’s coming true.

“It feels unbelievable,” he says. “When I look out and see how many people are in our crowds … We all love playing the shows. And we love that everyone is into it more now. Hell, yeah. We think it’s better, too.”

The sun is shining down on the drained bowl of Bethesda Fountain as he sums up the state of Geese heading into 2027. “Honestly, I believe in my bandmates so much,” DiGesu says. “We have, what, three albums out? There’s so much ahead of us. I’m excited to see what we can do to music, man.”

A FEW HOURS LATER, I find Green on the Lower East Side, in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge. Gray storm clouds are gathering over the East River as we mount the towering industrial structure where jazz great Sonny Rollins famously went when he needed a break from the spotlight in 1959. “I like walking when I have conversations,” Green — tall, wiry, dressed in all black — tells me as we begin to make our way over the river toward Brooklyn. “It keeps the hamster wheel going.”

The conversation pauses every few moments to let a J, M, or Z train lumber loudly past us, but also because Green is someone who chooses her words with great care. When Geese were recording their first widely released album, 2021’s Projector, in Bassin’s basement during their senior year of high school, she never let herself imagine any kind of career in music: “I had no expectations,” she says. “It’s just so rare. There’s so many bands, and so many of them have a very short life span and a very small amount of people that listen to them or come to the shows.” Now, six years later, the fact that she’s the lead guitarist in a world-renowned rock band is still hard to process sometimes. “I mean, it’s even more ludicrous and unrealistic, the life that I live,” she says.

Just the other day, she visited a record shop in Ridgewood, Queens, and found her band’s music on a shelf marked “Dad Rock,” near some Wilco LPs. “There’s a Geese section in record stores!” she says, sounding incredulous. “We play big shows that sell out for people that really want to see them. Playing in the band is a ton of fuckin’ fun.” But that’s not how it always feels. “No, of course not,” she adds. “My brain is very good at finding things to complain about.”

She falls silent for about 30 seconds when I ask her about something DiGesu told me earlier — that everyone in Geese is “having a great time, and a terrible time, at the same time.” He played that comment off as a joke, but Green knows what he meant. “I guess we can’t really move with as much abandon as we used to be able to,” she says finally. “It’s strange, because in some ways we have more freedom to do what we want, but the decisions that we do make echo more. It gets heavy.”

The increased number of business meetings and conference calls required to be part of a functioning band seems to be a source of pain for her. “Interfacing with the industry does not feel particularly conducive for making art,” she says. “I have not been able to find anything in it that makes me feel happy, or excited, or stimulated, or creative.”

She’d much rather be making music, which is how she spends nearly all of her free time. Since 2023, she’s played “capital-R Rock music” in Star’s Revenge, her side project with Sunflower Bean co-founder Olive Faber, whom she describes as “like my older sister.” “I just plug into an amp and shred for 30 minutes onstage,” she says. “It’s fun.” And in January, when Winter gave a spellbinding solo performance at a New York club under the name Chet Chomsky, Green opened the show with her own set of bittersweet, melodic gems that sounded nothing like Geese. Most of them were new songs she’d dashed off earlier that day. “When I write a song, there’s a very narrow window of time when it’s accurate to who I am as a person,” she says. “Maybe when I stop changing so much, I’ll be able to write songs that last longer.”

“I think about everything — how we’re perceived, what the fuck we’re going to do next.”

We’ve crossed over into Williamsburg now, and Green stops when she spots a record store across the street. “Do you mind?” she asks. “Five minutes.”

Inside the store, sure enough, there are several copies of Getting Killed, including a limited-edition violet-wax pressing with a $75.99 price tag. Green wanders over to the folk racks and picks up a copy of the late singer-songwriter Karen Dalton’s 1969 debut. As she brings it over to the register, some kids sitting in the store start murmuring about Geese and shooting glances her way. “I wonder if they thought you’re my bodyguard,” Green quips after we leave.

She’s been doing her best to stay offline this year, mostly because reading about herself on social media makes her feel “horrible”: “There’s an Emily that exists in lots of people’s heads that is not accurate to who I am as a human being, and it’s strange to see that person reflected back onto me.”

However mixed her feelings about being a public figure, she’s optimistic about where Geese can go from here. “I still think we can make better music,” she says. “Mostly I just think that I’ve lived almost two years since recording Getting Killed, and I’m better at being a human being. We all are. Everyone grew up.”

The biggest difference? She’s learning to trust herself. “I was anxious as hell making that record,” she adds. “I put a lot of pressure on myself to be fucking awesome.… It feels better to stay loose.”

There are certain standards that Geese will always hold themselves to, though. When I ask how long she can picture this band going — Ten more years? How about 20? — she laughs. “As long as we can make good music,” she says. “The second it gets bad, we’ve got to fucking shut down the whole operation.”

AFTER MY CONVERSATIONS with DiGesu and Green, the band heads to Manchester, Tennessee, to play Bonnaroo — a festival that they all think of fondly, thanks to the memories they made there on their first trip in 2024. “It was one of the biggest crowds we’d ever played to at that point,” Bassin tells me when I meet him at his favorite coffee shop, a Danish roastery in Bushwick, the following Monday afternoon. “Really sick, nighttime slot. We had an insane show, then played an even freakier show at, like, two in the morning.”

This year doesn’t sound like it was quite as sick, just a quick trip in and out, but Bassin is in a terrific mood all the same as he peruses the single-origin beans on display, reading the copy on each label aloud for comic effect. “Crisp, tropical, round: No. Juicy: No. Very floral: No.” He settles on a $25 sack of Rutas Del Inca, orders an iced oat latte, and takes a seat, dripped out per usual in a dark-red hoodie, oversize bug-eye shades, and several chunky silver rings.

The city is buzzing after the Knicks’ victory over the weekend, and Geese’s affable drummer is no exception. While DiGesu is by far the biggest Knicks loyalist in the group — Bassin reps the Nets, and Winter was more of a football kid growing up — Geese, like everyone else across the five boroughs, got swept up in finals fever. So, the night after they flew back from Bonnaroo, all four of them gathered with some friends to watch Game Five projected onto a white bedsheet in Bassin’s backyard. Around midnight, after Jalen Brunson and his teammates took the championship in San Antonio, the whole group poured out into the street to celebrate.

“I put a lot of pressure on myself to be awesome. It feels better to stay loose.”

“Pretty immediately, someone clocked that all of Geese was standing on a corner in Ridgewood,” Bassin recalls. “I was like, ‘OK, we should probably go back in as soon as possible.’”

This kind of thing is happening more often to Geese lately — earlier, DiGesu told me with amusement about getting recognized by the staff at a dispensary. But being treated like a celebrity is still a bit surreal for Bassin, who grew up in a neighborhood full of them: “You’d see Jason Sudeikis in sweatpants walking down the street and be like, ‘That’s my neighbor Jason.’”

Back then, music was something he did for fun with Winter and Green, his classmates at Brooklyn Friends School. “We started playing music together really fucking young,” Bassin says, remembering sessions that began when the three of them were no more than nine years old. “There’s a bunch of recordings we did that are terrible, but it goes all the way back. To all the people that think we’re an industry plant: 2011, bruh.”

Geese often felt a little out of step with their generation of teens. “It was so uncool to be a band,” Bassin says. They got a boost to their confidence in the summer of 2018, when Bassin, Green, and Winter went to see the Aussie act King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard at Brooklyn Steel. (DiGesu hadn’t turned 16 yet, so he stayed home.) “The entire crowd was a mosh pit,” Bassin recalls. “We left that show saying, ‘Oh, my God, band music is back, baby. We gotta lock in and be like those guys.’” Within a few years, Geese would be opening for them.

Today, Bassin is a man of many enthusiasms. In addition to being a budding coffee snob, he’s an amateur photographer (he’s been trying out a vintage point-and-shoot that reminds him of one he saw in Austin Powers); a happy stoner; and a tattoo aficionado, with dozens of miniature images covering his forearms, many of them inked by visual artist Charlotte Tampol, his partner of about six years. “I pretty much told her, ‘Go ahead and practice on me,’” he says.

To a casual observer, Bassin might seem like the most chill member of Geese, but he says there’s “a chronic overthinker” beneath that relaxed exterior. “I think about everything — how we’re perceived, what the fuck we’re going to do next, what I wear to shows,” he says. “It’s part of why I smoke so much weed. It makes my brain slow down a bit.”

Before we part, I ask if he’s heard any of Winter’s new solo album. This is the sequel to the singer’s debut, Heavy Metal, whose legend has grown exponentially since its release in December 2024, and Geese fans are dying to hear it. So are his bandmates, who have steadfastly supported his solo work even when their own label was lukewarm on it. Though Winter has performed several new ballads full of spiritual allusions and profound emotions at his recent solo gigs — including a show at Carnegie Hall that’s being released this fall as a live album and a concert doc directed by Paul Thomas Anderson — Bassin tells me he has yet to hear any studio versions.

“He keeps it very close to the chest,” he says of the bandmate he’s been tight with since third grade. “I know that about him. But he’s working really fucking hard on it right now.”

“I’m glad that people have thoughts about our stuff. At least we’re not boring and mid.”

AROUND 6 P.M THAT EVENING, Winter moseys up to a storefront Chinese-takeout spot in Bed-Stuy. He’s dressed nondescriptly in a grayish T-shirt and dark pants, carrying a black backpack and a plastic shopping bag. He stares at the faded pictures of lo mein above the counter and orders a small container of steamed pork dumplings, which he pays for in cash. “I should stop eating pork,” he says, dipping a dumpling into some sauce. “Just because they torture them to death. I feel like it’s a real blind spot in my life that I still eat meat.”

Winter seems tired, and he tells me he just came from a solo recording session. I ask if he had fun at Bon­naroo over the weekend. “Kind of,” he says. “It was more fun the first time, because we were all high as fuck. Everyone and their mother wanted to give us shrooms, and we partook. But this time, it was all business.”

How about the NBA Finals party the next night? “I am happy about the Knicks, definitely,” he says, though he doesn’t sound too elated, particularly when he starts talking about how it felt to be approached by a gaggle of Geese fans on the street afterward.

“I don’t know why the fuck Max lives in Ridgewood,” he says, referencing the neighborhood whose per-capita listens to Geese’s music likely outpace much of the city’s. “It’s the belly of the beast. It’s like throwing a mango to an anthill.”

Every other member of Geese has told me that their lives have changed dramatically since Getting Killed (“Obviously,” Green said), but when I ask Winter the same question, he seems unsure of how to answer. “Kind of,” he says again. “It’s hard to tell. In a lot of ways, not much has changed at all. Like, my routines are not different. It feels like everyone else has changed.”

Those routines run deep for him: working on music every day, slowly hammering toward some kind of transcendence. But so does a sense of resentment. Even the supportive environment that produced Geese — in his case, a composer father and a writer mother, both Jewish, who encouraged him to pursue his interests from an early age — seems to have left a sour taste in his mouth.

“We were supported against our wills, really,” he says. “My parents made me take piano lessons from when I was six. I hated them. Even the rock-school thing was tedious to me. I liked hanging out with my friends and bashing on the instruments, but really my parents just wanted me out for the weekend. We were lucky to have those supports, but I only started feeling good when the supports were gone and I insisted on quitting the piano lessons, or I outgrew the friggin’ rock-school thing, and started doing it on our own.”

For all of his independence, though, he’s troubled by the idea that other people find his band’s music challenging. Take the reaction to their Saturday Night Live performance, all the confused and hostile comments from viewers unfamiliar with Geese’s game.

“It really fucked me up just how hard people took it,” he tells me. “Of course, there were plenty of music-nerd people who loved it, but I felt like the reason they loved it was almost because it was sticking it to these average people who just turn on SNL after work. It depressed the shit out of me, because that’s not what I was trying to do. It’s not like I wanted to play a fucking song in a weird time signature that’s really loud and repetitive, and then just be like, ‘Ha, ha, you don’t get it like we do.’” He thumbs his nose, waggling his fingers impishly. “That’s stupid. But a lot of what we do gets seen as that. I don’t know how to fix that.”

He’s been struggling with how to balance these concerns in the new music he’s working on — the desire to make something that expresses his unique point of view, while also being accessible to listeners. “It’s hard,” he says. “I used to write songs with interesting, difficult almost, chords in them, and now it’s like I-IV-V until the cows come home.” Even a mildly unorthodox musical choice feels pretentious to him now: “It’s actually getting worse and worse. It’s like the fucking rut is getting deeper and deeper, because then I do a ii chord, and I’m just like, ‘Ew. What are you, fucking Keith Jarrett, you piece of shit?’”

It’s a funny line, but I can’t help noticing the thread of harsh self-critique that runs through much of what he says. Starting to feel a little like an unlicensed therapist, I ask Winter where that comes from. “I don’t know, my Semitic side?” he jokes.

Gesturing at the madness that has surrounded Geese for the past year, he says, “There are parts of it that are hard for me, in particular. Like, even Max, for example, he’s better at dealing with all of this than me. It hurts my feelings a lot. It’s just a drag. It’s like I said before: It feels like everyone else has lost their fucking minds, and everything that is good that’s happened to me and bad that’s happened to me is the work of other people from start to finish, and it’s just a big fucking maelstrom, and honestly, I’d rather not be part of it.”

“Come to the show. Just come to the show, and tell me How many bots you see.”

When he was younger, he sometimes wondered what it would be like to be in this position. He doesn’t have to wonder anymore. “Like, why do bands break up when they’re so popular? Oh, don’t I know now,” he says. “It’s actually a miracle bands don’t break up sooner.” He laughs morosely, and lowers his voice. “I just want to feel like a person, an actual person. It doesn’t make you feel good to feel like more than a person.”

Up until this point, Winter has answered every question I ask with admirable openness. But his face falls when I bring up one more of this year’s hottest Geese-related discussion topics: the paparazzi snapshots of him and Olivia Rodrigo walking side by side, smiles on both their faces, after dining together in Los Angeles in April. (They have not been photographed together since.) What did two of the most singular voices of their generation talk about at that meal?

He hesitates, looking miserable, and I tell him he doesn’t have to discuss this if he doesn’t want to. But he waves away that offer. “Oh, we just talked about the Founding Fathers,” Winter says softly. “It’s a rich topic.”

“SEE, IF HE’S SMART, he’s going to double that diagonal with that bishop,” Winter says two months later, in early August. “But little does he know, I have queen-to-e7, which completely stops him in his tracks.”

He and DiGesu have just whipped out their phones for a quick chess match in Geese’s private rehearsal and recording space. They’re seated on either end of a well-worn red-orange couch, with Bassin and Green between them. Though this site’s exact location is a closely guarded secret, due to what we might call the mango/anthill factor, it’s nothing special once you get inside — just a little room somewhere in New York City, crowded with musical instruments and random items (a basketball jersey with former Nets center Nic Claxton’s name; a deck of Geese tarot cards; an anti-tech zine called Summer of Ludd). But it’s the first time they’ve had a clubhouse to call their own since the basement days, and Winter, in particular, has made good use of it this year, chipping away at his new solo record in a cubicle-like corner where a tiny harmonica rests on a desk near a computer monitor and a couple of guitars.

He still hasn’t shared any of his works in progress with his bandmates, and he isn’t sure if the new songs he performed at Carnegie Hall will make the cut. “People give me so much credit. I can fuck it up and they’re just like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah!’” Winter says, mock-applauding. So he’s been trying to tune out the public’s responses to his work, both positive and negative, with limited success. “It intrudes,” he says. “You’ll be able to hear that on track four with this new project. Just go to the 45-second mark and listen very closely, and you’ll hear all the funny business getting in the way.”

The new songs that Geese began recording straight to tape last year with Getting Killed producer Kenneth Blume (formerly known as Kenny Beats), meanwhile, remain in limbo. “They could all come out at some point, but I don’t anticipate that,” Bassin says, calling them “essentially very high-quality demos of ideas… We were sort of just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what stuck.”

If they do any more recording together this year, it probably won’t happen until the winter. (“That’s when we tend to lock in more,” DiGesu told me earlier.) First, they’ll head out on this fall’s Getting Killed Again Tour, which includes their biggest hometown shows ever: two nights in October at the 13,000-capacity Forest Hills Stadium in Queens.

“We’re milking this Getting Killed thing for all it’s worth,” Bassin says.

Green, sitting next to him, agrees: “There’s still more to be milked.”

Soon all four bandmates are cracking one another up with a series of increasingly outlandish dairy-themed puns.

“I’m milking that shit,” Bassin repeats as the others laugh. “I’m getting down on my hands and knees and milking.”

“The udder ain’t dry yet,” Winter declares with a sly smile.