Cameron Winter Reckons with the Existentially Absurd on Heavy Metal

Heavy Metal, the debut solo project of Geese vocalist Cameron Winter, is just as mystifying and impenetrable as the probable origin stories that its creator has spun for it. Was the album recorded in a series of Guitar Centers across the New York tri-state where Winter is now banned for life? Was he crammed in hotel closets, mic pressed against his lips, as he laid down the haunting, grim secrets that make up the album’s choruses? There’s rumors of taxi back seats, jam sessions in the public eye and Wellbutrin-fueled nights in abandoned basements being the sites for Heavy Metal’s creation as Winter continues to unapologetically weave his own lore both in and out of the music. But if there’s anything that this commitment to the bit—or, dedication to the uncanny truth—proves, it’s that Winter wants us to be in on the cosmic joke that guides his life, and informs his enlightening folk rock and pragmatic, anxious songwriting. 

In the realm of Geese—the Brooklyn-based rock band that he sings for—Winter plays the role of the brash, dynamic frontman who manages to inject both intoxicating fun and sincerity into his songwriting and performance. 3D Country, the band’s 2023 release, is as intense and adventurous as it is tender and existential, and the same can be said about Heavy Metal—but in a different vein. As he croons over love, loneliness, the banalities of 9 to 5 culture and God, Winter’s warbling voice goes down to a groan but lifts up into a faint cry in the same sentence, crafting a level of intimacy that is immersive and intensely heart-wrenching. Just as you’re on the verge of tears, he’ll reference dancing “with a candy gun toward the president’s ass,” and you’ll have to laugh at the brilliant, emotional absurdity he’s managed to enact.

Heavy Metal possesses limitless concepts, stories, journeys and fables rolled into one. “Nausicaä (Love Will Be Revealed)” is profound and somewhat prophetic, as Winter voices his need to see and be seen, to hear and be heard, to know that someone is here and for someone to know that he is here. In Homer’s Odyssey, Nausicaä is young and beautiful, and helps Odysseus after he is shipwrecked by offering him clothes and bringing him back to the edge of town. The songs of Heavy Metal ache with a deep sense of longing, and a hope that help will come in the form of love—which takes many different shapes throughout. Love will be revealed, it “takes miles,” but it will eventually call—and when it does come, it will be like nothing you’ve ever felt before. “Something will take you by your pants and swing you over your head and kick you back and forth,” Winter begins to ramble on “Love Takes Miles,” a track whose slight soft-pop motifs and gentle piano riff make it swell with an infectious warmth. The song gives Heavy Metal this identity as a hero’s journey, marked by the search for authentic love—internal and external—in a parasitic culture that draws on our isolation and existentialism instead.  

Winter is only 22 years old, and that fact seems more relevant when listening to “Drinking Age,” the album’s fourth and arguably most harrowing track. “Today I met who I’m gonna be / from now on and he’s a piece of shit,” he laments over the piano—more faint this time—with the same stinging actuality that Johnny Cash spoke from in “Hurt.” He accepts adulthood, tackling the underbelly of a coming of age tale. “Drinking Age” sounds like crying on your birthday and taking your line of the MTA routinely each day—a flatlining realization that this is life for the time being. At the end, Winter’s voice ruptures into unintelligible wailings and vibrating lip smacks, a beautifully cathartic way of dealing with the avalanche of awareness that is hitting him all at once. As his generation begins to enter the workforce and grapples with this reality, myself included, the song is both painfully relatable but comforting to know that someone is searching for the meaning behind it all. “I am wired to The Man,” he goes on to admit on “Cancer of the Skull,” adding, “I take the train at dawn for him.” Winter navigates his songwriting with a mindful nonchalance, and a hyper-awareness of the world that surrounds him—the result being an emotional exorcism that slowly rips at you from the inside. 

There’s a sardonic self-awareness that defines Heavy Metal and its existentialism, but the illusive presence of God and religion throughout the album blurs the line between handcrafted irony and pure authenticity. References to deity reveal themselves, such as when he tells his lover they were born to hold his “cannonball brain like the Lord holds the moon” on “Try as I May.” The most damning display of this is the feverish descent of “$0,” in which Winter triumphantly proclaims, “God is real, I’m not kidding this time, I think God is actually for real, I wouldn’t joke about this.” For how straightforward his claims of enlightenment are, his detached, impassive tone still makes it hard to tell if he truly is for real or not (he swears he is). It shouldn’t be funny, but in a feat that is nothing less than impressive, it still manages to be. But it feels as though that was one of Winter’s goals with the work—to create a paradigm of truth and fiction, reality and the abstract, humor and utter seriousness. 

Cameron Winter’s style lands somewhere between Leonhard Cohen, “post-punk and Rufus Wainwright” (to quote the anonymous “theories” tab on his site), with dashes of Car Seat Headrest’s Will Toledo coming through in the album’s more lo-fi and shrill moments. Heavy Metal is enchanting, clever and jarring—effortlessly blending all of these raw feelings into an evocatively poignant work. Through his debut, Winter has crafted a fascinating world that hasn’t stopped with the album’s end—as he continues to spread stories of Craigslist-hired musicians and five-year-old bassists—perhaps to throw listeners and writers off the trail of trying to understand a work that is meant to bask in obscurity. Winter has made it clear that he’s not here to be understood, and that this project is an outlet for him to be free, explore and, most importantly, embrace the spiral.