Heavier Metals: One Year of Cameron Winter’s Heavy Metal

The third time I listened to Cameron Winter, I was sitting on a cold and slightly damp rock on the edge of the Georgetown Waterfront, completely alone, watching a bright white heron fly back and forth. I felt like Winter was speaking directly to me and for me, like he was singing my grief and my salvation. That was the first week of May, a week in which I smoked more cigarettes than the previous five months combined, incrementally poisoning myself and slowly bringing my body ever closer to the disease that took someone from me. On this day, just about five months since the release of Heavy Metal, Cameron Winter was only on the very edges of my consciousness, a pair of haunted eyes that peered from an album cover. All I knew was that Heavy Metal was decidedly not heavy metal at all, at least not in the traditional sense. At that moment, Cameron Winter had spoken to many more than just me sitting alone on my rock, but it still felt like my best-kept secret, a slim book of poems that existed between my ears only. 

Over the next few months, I could only thumb through that book occasionally, because more often than not any one song would bring me instantly to tears. I could hardly even speak the name of the person who created this album that seemed to grip my soul so tightly. The soulful voice, the impenetrable but haunting lyricism, and folk-ish sensibility were unlike anything I’d heard before, or anything I thought I’d ever hear again. But due in part to the omnipotent and all-encompassing capital-a Algorithm, I ever so slowly understood that Cameron Winter (and ‘geesetwt’) was a phenomenon in and of himself, having amassed a seemingly small but devoted (and chronically online) following that spread the holy Heavy Metal gospel wherever they went. 

Photo Credits: Bandcamp

Heavy Metal dropped with a small splash, landing glowing reviews from Pitchfork and others, but little widespread recognition. Mid-December isn’t exactly the ideal time for an album release, in the molasses days of winter when the end-of-year roundups have all been published and the year’s musical discourse has more or less solidified. But Heavy Metal wasn’t completely shouting into the void. Geese (do they need an introduction?), the band fronted by Cameron Winter, had garnered a modest following themselves after the release of two studio albums Projector (2021) and 3D Country (2023). However, both Geese and Cameron Winter were firmly in the if-you-know-you-know space, circling around the indie rock sphere without a wider breakthrough into the mainstream. So who, in January 2025, was listening to the prophetic warblings of a twenty-two-year-old from Brooklyn? Who was listening to the string-plucking madness of an ambiguously religious reciter of Homeric characters?

Look no further than our own magazine to find the appreciator of a “true artist” (thank you Elliot), someone who found that Cameron Winter spoke some sort of deep truth to life, breathing into our generation a sense of itself, a level of authenticity and vulnerability underneath abstruse literary allusions. He longs for “Nausicaä,” a Greek princess, a burner of ships, at one moment, and croons of “baby horses on my chest / trying to push me out to sea” at another. For a generation that is constantly harkening back to the past, yearning on some semi-conscious level for the bygone eras of CDs, LPs, cheap rent and yet undiscovered musical landscapes, Winter is a revelation. Winter is someone of our own. 

On social media we are constantly engaged in a double-movement between differentiating ourselves and making ourselves known, between signaling just the right amount of niche and esoteric cultural knowledge while maintaining our status as knowable and relatable objects, packaged and marketed suitably without alienating the audience we all now possess on our social media platforms. Heavy Metal eschews all attempts at knowability, refuses all postures towards universality and easy-access. Heavy Metal was not market-tested or researched; it was not even marketed much at all. Its appeal comes from the knowledge, impossible to ignore upon listening, that the album arose some pre-lingual feeling of truth, whatever truth means. Each song attempts to give form and expression to something deeply inexpressible, something that can only be gestured at in each song. No wonder, then, that despite the inherently inaccessible nature of Heavy Metal, Cameron Winter slowly but surely grew in popularity, snowballing toward a larger and larger audience.

By June of 2025, just before Geese released “Taxes,” the lead single for their upcoming album, Cameron Winter had at least 100,000 more Spotify listeners than the band he fronted. As additional singles from Getting Killed (2025) came out, Geese’s Spotify listeners spiked exponentially. Cameron Winter’s also continued to grow, although not quite as steeply. And then of course, when Getting Killed was released on September 26, 2025, the world went nuts. Article after article dropped, GQ dubbed them “America’s Most Thrilling Young Rock Band,” and male Hinge dates finally found a new topic of conversation. How then did this band that occupied a niche corner of my Twitter timeline turn into a seemingly overnight success? The short answer is, I have no idea. Well, that’s not entirely true. The success of Geese is in no small part due to the success of Cameron Winter, the loyal following that Heavy Metal engendered who were primed and ready for whatever weirdness was to follow. Sonically, Getting Killed (2025) and Heavy Metal (2024) are worlds away, but they speak to something very similar at their core. Something raw, unvarnished, screams into the mic not of religious ecstasy and existential dread but anger and passion, deep love and want. (Once again, see Elliot Anderson’s fantastic review.) 

Getting Killed exploded well beyond just the audience of Heavy Metal listeners, and brought even more attention to Heavy Metal. The line of Cameron Winter listeners went up and up, increasing its slope and reaching the culmination of its upward momentum at the dawn of his Carnegie Hall debut on December 11th, one year and five days after Heavy Metal’s release. What else can be said about the show that has yet to be said? Historic, yes. Eerily reminiscent of Bob Dylan? Of course. Cameron Winter has officially broken containment, reaching the attention of scalpers charging two thousand dollars for a ticket (I know, I checked) and directors alike (hello Paul Thomas Anderson). But despite the hype, the memes, and the reels, the reason he is on that stage is clear. Clad in black with one spotlight illuminating his greasy almost-curls, he seemed to be completely alone in the room, alone in his talent, alone perhaps in his success, in the hyperattention and awareness unseen in the music industry in quite a long time. 

Cameron Winter and Geese have been expounded upon by seemingly every major publication in the United States, now becoming the fuel for that same niche and esoteric, yet cool and relatable cultural cache that Heavy Metal was a foil against. The listeners of both Winter’s band and solo material are now well into the millions on Spotify, and any claim that either is underground will no doubt result in heavy eye-rolls by most in our generation. Will they continue this exponential climb into indie-rock stardom? Or will their star burn out? Geese and Winter are now gracing some of the most famous stages in music, from SNL to Coachella, far from the Brooklyn bedrooms that birthed their genius. If Winter’s first solo project felt like he was singing alone in a darkened room, what might he write after being vaulted to the world’s stage? Wherever his path may lead, this wider audience is still responding to the same thing; a heart-wrenching poet for the modern age.

---

Ariana Hameed is a senior in the College double majoring in American Studies and Computer Science, Ethics and Society, with a focus on Sentences With Too Many Commas.