Why Geese Were ‘Scared’ of Sounding Like Radiohead
Looking back at our 2023 interview, Geese’s anxiety about imitating their heroes reveals a band still working out how strange, funny and unmistakably themselves they could become.
Radiohead are a dangerous band to imitate. For one, it’s been done. A lot. For another, much of what makes their music so special is incredibly difficult to replicate. You can borrow the falsetto, the strange guitar sounds and the existential dread, but unless Nigel Godrich happens to be sitting behind the desk, there’s a good chance you’re going to end up sounding like a considerably worse version of Radiohead.
Geese were apparently well aware of that danger. When we interviewed Cameron Winter and Max Bassin around the release of 3D Country in 2023, Radiohead inevitably came up. ‘They’re in our DNA to a degree,’ Bassin told us. ‘I feel like I’m always really scared that we’re just going to sound like Radiohead because so many bands try to sound like Radiohead, and it doesn’t work.’
Listening to Geese now, that fear feels slightly strange. There are traces of Radiohead in their music, certainly. Winter's voice occasionally climbs into a higher register that can sound distinctly Yorke-esque, and Geese share their willingness to make rock music considerably stranger than it needs to be. But I've never listened to the band and thought they were particularly indebted to Radiohead. If anything, I've always heard more of The Strokes in them. Winter's crooning rasp makes the comparison difficult to avoid, while songs like ‘3D Country’ and ‘Cowboy Nudes’ feel closer to the lineage of New York's garage-rock revival than anything on OK Computer.
My own relationship with Geese has been slightly complicated. I thought Projector was a bit meh when it arrived in 2021. It was all over the place, the artwork was terrible, but there was clearly a band underneath it with the potential to go somewhere much more interesting. 3D Country was where everything clicked. Suddenly, Geese seemed to have found their feet, and I became convinced they could be one of the best bands of their generation. It remains one of my favourite albums of the decade.
At the time of our interview, Geese were talking openly about the records that had helped them get there. Radiohead were only one part of it. Winter spoke about getting heavily into Ween, whose sense of humour gave the band permission to stop taking everything quite so seriously. The Beatles had entered the picture too, while Bob Dylan and Scott Walker were among the other artists being absorbed around the making of 3D Country.
Those influences make considerably more sense to me when placed alongside one another. You can hear something of The Beatles in Geese's growing understanding of hooks and songcraft, while Winter became a much stronger lyricist around 3D Country, with Dylan providing one possible reference point. Ween's contribution might be the most important of all. Humour became part of Geese's identity, giving them permission to be ridiculous without turning themselves into a novelty band.
That quality has only become more pronounced. By Getting Killed, Winter could scream ‘there’s a bomb in my car’ and somehow have it feel completely at home within a Geese song. It's the sort of thing that lends itself perfectly to the meme age, and probably played some part in the increasingly cult-like following that has formed around them. The new fans can occasionally be a little Tame Impala fanbase for my liking, but the humour and unpredictability are undoubtedly part of why Geese have connected with so many people.
Getting Killed also represented another leap in the band's musicianship. They're tighter now, and Winter's voice has improved enormously. His increasingly strange delivery has become one of Geese's defining features, but that didn't happen overnight. He's spent years refining it, stretching his falsetto and rasp into increasingly extreme shapes. Practice makes perfect, even when the eventual result sounds completely unhinged.
Still, I prefer the songs on 3D Country any day of the week. There was something exciting about hearing Geese arrive at that sound in real time. Looking back at our interview now, you can hear a band working out exactly what it wanted to keep and what it wanted to discard. Winter told us that Projector had been made with an intentionally serious attitude, whereas 3D Country came from wanting to have more fun and embrace his increasingly unusual vocal instincts. By the time Getting Killed arrived, they'd taken those ideas even further.
That's ultimately where the difference between influence and imitation lies. Greta Van Fleet sounding uncannily like Led Zeppelin is one thing. Absorbing something from Radiohead and pushing it through your own ideas is another. Geese may have been frightened of becoming another band unsuccessfully chasing Radiohead, but perhaps being conscious of that possibility helped prevent it from happening.
Radiohead weren't the only band Geese were conscious of being compared to, either. Elsewhere in that 2023 interview, the band discussed The Strokes and Interpol, alongside newer groups such as Squid, black midi and Black Country, New Road. They were clearly emerging within a long lineage of bands whose influence could easily become baggage. The trick was finding a way to take from all of it without ending up as the sum of those references.
That's something Geese have increasingly managed. Their music can be subtly complicated, but it remains surprisingly catchy. Songs like ‘I See Myself’, ‘Au Pays du Cocaine’ and ‘Taxes’ can satisfy the urge to pull apart what the band are doing while still functioning as songs a room full of people can scream back at them. That's a difficult balance, and it's become much more important to their identity than sounding like Radiohead, The Strokes, Ween or anyone else.
Perhaps that's the best way to deal with the fear of sounding too much like your heroes. Don't pretend they haven't influenced you. Take what you need, throw several completely different influences on top, keep fucking around with it and eventually hope the individual ingredients become difficult to identify.
Geese were scared of sounding like Radiohead. Three years later, they mostly just sound like Geese.
