Echoes of A Certain Ratio and Wire mixed with some absolutely melodically chaotic guitar arrangements showcases a band that belies their youth. The group began as a project for the group of friends to build a home studio in one of their basements. The space, referred to as “The Nest” became a breeding ground for the band to work on songs and figure out recording techniques all between the time when they finished school for the day until a strict 10:00 curfew time. This limited amount of hours helped to capture the fresh immediacy we hear throughout Projector. An album that was supposed to be a one and done before the band broke up and went off to their respective colleges but became a calling card, sparking a label frenzy trying to sign the group. With their college plans on hold and the album about to drop, we caught up with lead singer/songwriter Cameron Winter who reflects on how they got to this point, what this surprise life change means to them and what the future may hold.

“We all had college plans,” Winter explains when we reach him from his home in Brooklyn. “We figured since we have been playing together since freshman year and kind of just dicked around but we wanted to try our hardest on making a last record and try to make something cohesive just to see if we could, that was sort of the mindset.” Winter and the band definitely succeeded at making something cohesive. Projector explodes right out from the opening salvo of the track “Rain Dance” and doesn’t let up. Even though the song’s arrangements split off and go in a multitude of directions before meeting up again, nothing here ever feels excessively overwrought. This could be the outcome of the band being more of a recording project than a live project from the start. “Three of us have fathers that are in the music industry,” Winters says about how their studio came together. “They had recording equipment lying around, we had already been playing music ourselves and with this leftover equipment, we thought let’s get all this stuff into one place and see what we can do on a tight budget. Max, Gus and I had been playing together and we wanted to start this studio so that’s how the band properly started.”

The process of learning how to actually record the music that they were creating together was something that the group just dove into and worked as hard as they could on. “It was really fun but really hard for a couple of years. We just had no clue what we were doing,” Winter says with a laugh. “We were really bad at solving technical problems when they would come up and it was really easy to get overwhelmed when you are trying to record a whole drum set without phasing and also trying to do your fucking math homework at the same time but we settled into a good groove by the time we were recording Projector.” As Winter explains about the album’s recording process, “It was totally ramshackle and done as best as it could be with the means we have,” you would never know from listening. Sonically, Projector holds up against even some of the most professionally recorded albums of the last few years and that is a testament to the band’s ‘where there’s a will, there’s a way’ attitude about the whole endeavour.

With the record finished and the band preparing to embark on their separate paths, it was a shock, to put it mildly, when Geese started getting approached by labels who wanted to actually put out the album. “It was fucking insane,” Winter says completely earnestly of the experience. “Our highest ambition for the record a year and half ago was maybe, maybe we would get like 100 or 200 pressings from like a tiny label, we’ll get like five grand and we will split it amongst ourselves and we will have an actual vinyl of our work. That was the highest aspiration any of us could really imagine. So when labels started reaching out it definitely blew our minds. It’s been really fortunate.” With all this happening, the prospect of what the band was supposed to be has greatly changed. “Our last album has turned into our debut,” Winter says with a chuckle.

With Projector set to drop soon and the divergent paths of this group of friends now realigned, Geese is already deep into making their next album. “We’ve had not much to do through the last year other than repeat what we had done before, just a lot of practicing and a lot of writing material. It’s exciting to have this opportunity to plan out the next leg of development of the band. The pandemic has given us a bit of a grace period to stop and focus on writing really hard and find a way to grow our sound and our live performance. We’ve been immersed in it and it’s fun and exciting and we are looking forward to starting that next step.” Whatever that next step may be, it’s exciting that this band of friends who got together every day to learn and share and create will be continuing this process for themselves and us in the future.

Order tickets for Geese HERE

Pre-order Projector by Geese HERE