God Is Real: Investigating the cult of Cameron Winter

Posted On September 26, 2025September 26, 2025

Obsessing over a new artist and developing a parasocial relationship with them is nothing new, but the ways in which we as fans engage with these behaviours in the modern age are changing.

Instead of bombarding our favourite rock stars with liberally perfumed fan mail, we now set up sub-Reddits that over-analyse every minor detail of their publicly visible life, questioning whether they’re secretly dishing out clues about an upcoming release via dog pics on Instagram.

The thing is, where rabid fandom of acts in the past was usually reserved for the biggest names on the circuit, it isn’t just the megastars who have cult-like followings today. Appreciation societies for bands on the fringes of the mainstream tended to be for the ‘anoraks’; those who find joy in serious discussion about the musicality and cultural importance of their favourite acts. Of course, they’re still around, but it’s becoming more common for alternative acts to cultivate fanbases who demonstrate their appreciation through memetic behaviours, nerdy in-jokes and an unwavering bias or inability to acknowledge potential shortcomings.

For some, Cameron Winter will need no introduction, such is the rapid rise in stature that he’s experienced in the past 12 months or so. He’s the name on the lips of all the cool kids who frequent the smoking areas of the local pub venue like a place of worship; an awkward and gangly figure who inexplicably has legions of disciples bowing in praise at the presence of his Christ-like aura. Performing labyrinthine rock songs, both as a solo artist and with his band, Geese, he’s become the latest figure in the indie sphere to have accrued a fanbase of this ilk, but fathoming why is not exactly easy.

Like I say, he isn’t the first act of this kind to have this level of support heaped upon him against the odds. Cycle back to the beginning of the 2010s, and Mac DeMarco was another example of where an unassuming indie artist had the world fawning over him, his goofiness and ineffable charisma. A few years later, people began flocking towards King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard in a similar fashion, in raptures over their ability to not only claim they would deliver five studio albums in different genres in the space of a year, but to deliver them as well. Black Midi are another example, with listeners instantly becoming hooked on the idea of a group of teenagers playing intimidatingly complex prog rock.

The cult of Cameron Winter isn’t a million miles away from these prior examples, and the one thing that they all appear to have in common is the fact that the people at the centre of these projects are weirdos. Through offering something that’s a little off-kilter and reflective of the zanier, hyper-online side of society, they’ve risen to the upper echelons of relative obscurity; that is to say, they’re doing well enough to sell out large venues, but you might still have to explain who they are to those less in the loop.

There was a smattering of praise for Geese’s debut album, Projector, when it was released in 2021, but attention grew significantly upon their 2023 follow-up, 3D Country. A rollercoaster of a record that fused post-punk, art rock and Americana influences, the New York group started turning heads both in the music press and in online circles, and with that came the same trappings that their cultish predecessors endured. Meme pages with a dogged dedication to sharing Geese-themed shitposts began to spawn, rambling video essays that recited Wikipedia verbatim began circulating, and the comment sections on any Geese-related content began flooding with low-effort gags requesting that members come and fuck their wives – you know, the usual fare.

As insufferable as all of this might sound, and believe me, it’s exhausting every time it happens, the release of Cameron Winter’s debut solo record, Heavy Metal, may have steered clear of getting consumed by meme culture by being released with little to no hype around it. Coming out in December 2024, while the music world was obsessing over whether to follow the crowd and anoint Brat as the album of the year or not, Winter quietly put out a record of mature but slightly oddball singer-songwriter material that initially slipped under the radar and quietly accumulated an audience through a more organic, word-of-mouth buzz.

Despite this, the terminally online fans can still gawp at Winter’s versatility and riff on the humorous nature of lines like “the conga line behind me is a thousand chickens long”, and the anoraks can stroke their chins while drawing comparisons between the quasi-religious symbolism in his songs and the works of Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits. However, the underlying point beneath all of this is that if you approach his work with enough of an open mind and aren’t prone to being sucked in by effusive praise from either of these camps, you’ll realise that from a songwriting perspective, he’s genuinely that fucking good.

Not many others in their mid-20s can claim to have released a record as engrossing, intelligent, humorous and profound as Heavy Metal is, and even fewer can claim to have also delivered a couple of art rock records with the musical dexterity of Projector and 3D Country on top of this. With the arrival of Geese’s third record, Getting Killed, Winter returns to his rockier side, but it’s far from being meat-and-potatoes rock music; this is a band hell-bent on challenging expectations. 

Other songwriters, some even more established than Winter himself, recognise the raw talent that one can hear on Heavy Metal. In an interview with Far Out, Ezra Furman called him “an ecstatic fountain of language that mixes the mundane and the holy”, while emerging acts such as Westside Cowboy and Folk Bitch Trio have confessed to us that they’re incapable of putting it down. The praise for Winter comes from all angles, and it’s never a simple admission that he’s good; they’re always glowing appraisals of his work.

But, how does he go about avoiding making the same mistakes that those before him have made and capitalise on the growing obsession without compromising his artistry? DeMarco, King Gizzard and Black Midi all succumbed to their micro-celebrity status as bizarro indie darlings to varying degrees by making their unpredictability predictable, as though their decisions to present themselves as goofballs were driven by fans’ desires for them to be this way. Winter, however, still has a chance to cement himself as a star, both as a soloist and as Geese’s frontman, by being authentically himself.

Yes, he has some goofy sensibilities, such as the warbling vocal affectation he applies in a number of songs. He’s also not afraid to film himself miming to his own songs in the middle of New York in a Daft Punk/Peter Griffin hybrid shirt for his music videos. He still finds it funny to post reels of himself on TikTok looking like an NPC outside a Toby Carvery. However, beneath this peculiar veneer, there’s an apparent depth to his songcraft that’s absent from all the aforementioned examples, and by refusing to play up to being weird for the sake of weird, he might just end up transforming into one of the most important, albeit surrealistic, songwriters of his generation.

Related Topics