He’s been called Gen Z’s Bob Dylan and praised by Nick Cave. But is Cameron Winter for real?

I’d heard the stories. Cameron Winter made his 2024 solo album Heavy Metal by walking into various Guitar Center music stores around New York and using their equipment. Or maybe he recorded it in the back of a number of different taxis. Or maybe he went through Craigslist want ads and hired musicians he’d never met or played with before.

I’d also heard he was a Tom Waits fan and figured that perhaps he’d learnt as much from Waits’ penchant for fabricating his past and telling entertaining porkies as he had from his music.

But when Winter is asked point-blank if any of these stories have any truth in them at all, he looks genuinely surprised. “They’re all true,” he says. “People think I made them up, but I did all those things. I was desperate for musicians, and they’re really cheap on Craigslist. With Guitar Center, I’d just walk in to record and, at the end of the day, take everything on the hard drive.”

And no one working in any of these stores questioned what you were doing? “Eventually, someone will come up and ask what you’re doing, but I just turn on the charm and say, ‘How are you doing? Am I doing this right? Can you help me with this?’ People like to be included.”

We’re on Zoom, and I tilt my head and squint at him in the same way Larry David does in Curb Your Enthusiasm when he’s trying to figure out if someone is putting one over on him. There’s not even a hint of a smirk on Winter’s face. He looks as innocent as a lamb. The guy is either an excellent liar, or he genuinely used unorthodox methods when recording Heavy Metal.

The reason we’re talking is the release of Getting Killed, the third album from his band, Geese, ahead of an Australian tour in February. The record is another bold musical leap from a band that combines wildness and exemplary playing, while busting the boundaries between post-punk, indie-rock, math-rock, and even funk and soul.

Winter is in his apartment in the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Bed-Stuy, surrounded by bare white walls, a single lamp hanging above his head.

“As you can see, I’m going for a padded-room chic look,” he says. Then he does a massive yawn and grabs a tissue to wipe his nose, which he’ll do regularly over the next 45 minutes. He has a low, flat speaking voice and a slacker demeanour, somewhere between Adam Driver and Julian Casablancas.

He’s 23, and only moved out of home earlier this year. He has said in the past that he comes from a creative family. When pressed, he says that his father used to work on kids’ shows, including Sesame Street, then started his own business making production music for TV and commercials. Of his mother, he says, “She’s a very talented writer. You know the kids’ book series The 39 Clues? She wrote all of them, under various pseudonyms.”

It’s pretty easy to debunk this last claim. The popular adventure series is written by a number of different authors, many of them well known.

He got piano lessons from the age of six, ditched them when he was 13, but continued playing on his own because he loved the instrument. He was only around eight when he wrote his first song.

“It was about a lonely trucker,” he says. “Of course, I had no experience of being a trucker, but I wrote about ‘lonely roads’ and ‘where do I go?’ and stuff like that. I think I was just absorbing sad songs and spitting out my own songs based on them, like an algorithm. It was a piano ballad. I wrote piano ballads exclusively when I was a kid, and most of them were sad songs.”

He attended the Brooklyn Friends School, an independent school based on the Quaker faith, whose famous alumni included Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys. It was there that he met drummer Max Bassin and guitarist Emily Green, and the three of them became the core of Geese in 2016, when they were barely into their teens. The band also includes bass player Dominic DiGesu and touring keyboard player Sam Revaz.

For the first five years of their existence he estimates they only played live around six times, “because New York is a hard place for getting shows, plus we were basically children, so no one wanted to let us play. So we’d just record a lot.”

He wasn’t even born when The Strokes ushered in the New York rock revival in 2001, but he’s more than aware of the cyclical nature of the city’s music scene. “Hopefully these things move in cycles that work with our release schedule and our five-year plan, in order for us to profit enormously. That would be very convenient.” Even he can’t help offering a slight smirk as he says this.

Nick Cave is one of the many who are singing Winter’s praises. On his website The Red Hand Files, he rhapsodised about Heavy Metal, calling it “startling and wigged-out” and saying Winter had “a glorious, emotive voice with brilliant, blistering words”.

“What can I say?” says Winter, shrugging. “I thought it was great he said that. Am I a Nick Cave fan? Yeah, of course.”

For Getting Killed, the band decamped to Los Angeles to work with Kenny Beats, best known for producing IDLES and Vince Staples. “The big fires were happening around LA at the time, so we were wearing masks outside and it was a crazy atmosphere, a little like hell in the sky,” he recalls. “The studio is around UCLA and it’s flat and empty around there and that’s why we liked it. No distractions.”

On the new songs, Winter’s chameleonic voice continues to morph along with the band’s sound, while his lyrics are untamed beat poetry peppered with striking phrases – floating one moment, stinging the next. He’s already earned comparisons to Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen.

In Half Real, he sings: “I’ve got half a mind to just pay for the lobotomy and tell ’em to get rid of the bad times, and get rid of the good times too, I’ve got no more thinking to do”. He insists the line is not specifically about the current moment the US is living through, waking up every morning to a newsfeed that reads like an Orwellian nightmare.

“But when I write, I need to be engaged with the world. I lock into something and try to be a good witness so I can see the meaning in mundane things. When you do that, suddenly there’s a bajillion things to write about, and then you can just go, go, go.”

When asked about what writers he admires, he looks over to his right to his bookshelf and lists names. “William Gaddis, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, James Joyce. I love Joyce because he’s really human in his stream of consciousness. It’s not just aesthetic garbage. He’s trying to grasp something really deep, and you can tell he’s really excited about it. He’s got so much pity in his heart.”

As he says this, he becomes more enthusiastic than at any other point in our conversation. Maybe it’s because it sounds like that is what he’s striving for in his own work.

Other journalists have written about struggling to get Winter to reveal much about himself. In the new song Husbands he sings, “I’ll never explain, so you don’t have to waste your time.”

At the end of our time together, I quote that line back to him and tell him that I was worried the interview might be a washout. “Ah, that line?” he says, waving a dismissive hand. “I was just overstating things for effect.”

Geese’s Getting Killed and Cameron Winter’s Heavy Metal are both out now. Geese will perform at Laneway Festival throughout February, and at Sydney’s Metro Theatre on February 11, Melbourne’s Croxton Bandroom on February 12, and Perth’s Freo.Social on February 14. Cameron Winter will perform solo at Melbourne’s Forum on February 9 and the Sydney Opera House on February 16.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.