Free Birds
Get an exclusive first listen to the band’s first new music since their great 2021 debut
The Brooklyn band Geese debuted in the fall of 2021 with a great album called Projector. These guys were barely out of high school, and yet they seemed to have prodigiously bit off huge hunks of the indie guitar canon. Their bracing zone-outs could bring to mind vintage wizards like Television and the Feelies; their crisper, catchier moments recalled the Strokes and other stars of the Meet Me in the Bathroom era. They seemed to know their prog, and post-punk, and no wave — and they tied it all together with a heartening sense of discovery and easygoing erudition. They seemed to being going backward and forward at the same time.
That neo-retro vibe comes through on their delightful new single, “Cowboy Nudes.” As the title implies, it’s a weirdly unguarded pastorale. “We’re living in the future,” singer Cameron Winter offers in his most spacious Julian Casablancas croon. The guitars are bright and warm, the groove is liquid and pretty, the chorus lands somewhere between early-‘00s NYC and mid-1970s Southern California, like the Rapture doing Steely Dan.
In the video (co-directed by Winter), two attractive lovers drive into the countryside on a gorgeous afternoon. Their weekend in the woods will soon get playfully demented. The music does too, with a totally unexpected drum-circle freakout that warps the song’s pleasant back-to-the-land vibe into the kind of primitive wild times that might be a little uncomfortable to describe when the weekend in the woods is over and everyone is back home safe in the city.
They say it’s about ”life getting better, and more fun, after the end of the world.” That tension between chaos and kicks definitely comes through.