Cameron Winter’s ‘Heavy Metal’: A Hallucination I Never Wanted To End

IT’S BY PIPER!

When I started listening to Heavy Metal—the debut solo album from 22-year-old vocalist Cameron Winter—I texted Shelby, It’s like Leonard Cohen if he was experiencing auditory hallucinations. Shelby replied, This sounds like a glowing review to me. It is. Heavy Metal is on track to be one of my top albums of the year, and having spent the last few months trying to press my thumb against why, I keep coming up short. But I’m hooked.

If you’re unfamiliar with Cameron Winter, he is the frontman for Geese, a Gen-Z-led rock band from New York whose alt-country-adjacent punk album 3D Country has shot them into rapid popularity. This electrified little group—which has huddled in collaboration since their teenage years and grown tremendously in their sound as a collective—offers up a particular species of rock, hurtling with euphoria and oddness, unapologetic in its often joyous leaps into the surreal.

Then we have Winter’s solo work. Where 3D Country digs its heels in on Winter’s capacity for sharp and rowdy vocals (and incorporates some incredible instrumental work from the full Geese crew), Heavy Metal is pared back in many ways, yet much richer and more expansive in others. It’s a softer album, sure, perhaps in part to Winter’s self-admitted difficulty playing guitar, bass, or drums. But in the pull of his piano, he has produced an album that is, above all else, a showcase of an instrument he has mastered nearly in whole: his voice.

Starting into this album feels a bit like interrupting someone in the middle of a private conversation—his words are a little too close, a little too sincere, to stop and have a listen. And then you can’t help but stay. Opening with “The Rolling Stones,” a self-meditation that shares little in the way of his actual thoughts (a trend that continues through the full set of songs), Winter invites you into an album that is opaque in meaning and unapologetic of its haze, equal parts interested in finding its footing as it is in flying up the wall. The songs are loose and unpredictable, spinning tops of ideas, some finished, some undone, some open doors that can be walked through again and again. The odd phrasing, the awkward lingering, the stalling out, the strange tempos—this is an album made to be drunk all at once, to experience as the longest day of summer, full of heat and noise.

Compared to his work with Geese, the gravity of each song in Heavy Metal is Winter’s voice, and none of the backing instruments (despite building out the atmosphere) feel essential as guideposts. While the intense instrumentals of Geese songs often challenge Winter to arrive at the full capacity of his voice, these softer melodies have given him space to breathe into its subtle quirks. The bird-like quivers and warbles of his voice seem to be an adventure for him, too. One minute, he’s rolling you over on a punky vocal flip or a sudden burble, and the next, you’re sky-high on a vowel that he won’t let go of, wondering how he manages to carry the notes without shredding his throat. But there’s no sense of showboating. It’s clear that each note is a kind of compulsion, landing only where Winter feels it must go.

His enormous tone and range carry the same transfixing qualities of vocalists like the Buckleys, Leonard Cohen, and Nick Cave, with a playfulness that carries a similar punkiness to that of Lou Reed, Fiona Apple, Jim Morrison, and Martha Wainwright. His hearty vocals and his brash (primarily successful) experimentation are both a surprise and a testament to his youth. He has a necessary quality for his ilk: the inability to help being anything but himself. And while I could sink my teeth into plenty of potential influences, there is something singularly special in Winter’s work, with a sense of clarity and control that is defined enough to suggest he’s cycled through a few voices before this one.

When I pull up the roots of my devotion to Heavy Metal, what I find so intoxicating are the strange and occasionally inexplicable lyrics that are delivered with such conviction that one can experience phrases like “until the conga line behind me is a thousand chickens long” as immense, no matter what Winter intended: a metaphor on legacy or a literal assembly of the flock. Ukulele, chickens, pirates—he makes every senseless word feel sensational, and without an adequate replacement. There is something to his music, too, that is curious to look out at the world. Even the oddest statements are sewn into a tapestry of deep humanity, with occasional phrases that might knock a listener backwards against the wind of themself. In his lyrics, the absurd and the significant become partners, thanks to the vital truth they affirm in their co-existence: that’s how life rumbles.

Live performances have taken Winter from subway stations to late-night talk shows, but he gravitates towards cathedrals and churches, where he has performed several of the Heavy Metal shows that are scattered across the Internet. The nerd in me likes to imagine he is taken by the acoustics of the high ceilings, but there seems to be a spiritual element to all of Winter’s individual work, the floating concept of God, which he continues to publicly explore. His performances thus far have largely featured only himself and a piano, and he manages, in a few, rumbling phrases, to make the room glimmer. “I bring the front door into our house,” he sings, and in comes the world. You won’t find much chatter between tunes, and while every pause lends itself to uproarious applause, he doesn’t give the audience room to squirm, often rolling one song into the next without pause.

Despite this, he’s prone to uncomfortably long, direct gazes into the crowd, as well as lengthy silences between phrases, requiring everyone to settle into the claustrophobia of his lyrics: “Today, I met who I’m gonna be from now on—and he’s a piece of shit.” He fumbles for the brake on songs which are already a slow boil on the studio recordings, suspending the tempo from time to time, seemingly deciding on instinct when he cannot go on. His sets feel like tuning into a cohesive story, despite the abstract lyrics and blurry throughline, and no performance of any song is quite the same from one telling to the next. But the experience of the telling is enough to bring out droves of fans, seemingly to Winter’s surprise.

It’s hard to know if Winter understands the significance of his work. He’s quick with a joke, and much like his lyrics, seems to maintain a quality of obliqueness—it’s hard to fly close enough to see him in actuality. Interviewers who have tried to take a run at Winter have expressed a shared difficulty getting to the heart of his ideas. He folds in at efforts to reach in and withdraw the marrow of what drives his work, often offering unrelated callbacks or fun lies, and leaving strangers to assemble the public patchwork of Up-And-Coming Star Cameron Winter. When asked about the process for producing Heavy Metal, Winter made a number of attractive claims, including the recruitment of a 5-year-old bassist, impromptu recording sessions at various Guitar Centers, and a cohort of strangers from Craigslist filling in on the additional instruments. All or none of this could be true—and that’s not the point. The myth is sincere. Like all of us, he is finding his way through the story of himself.

Personally, I find his evasiveness endearing. Winter is strange, a quality that is essential in almost all the people I consider dear, but I’m unable to find fault in his desire to keep himself to himself, especially considering the self-roaring nature of his album; the confession that he, too, doesn’t know what to make of the world any better than the rest of us. Asking him to dig further into sincerity is missing the point. Where many other lyricists try to draw lines around universal concepts—love, death, hope, failure—to create a sitting room for a shared resonance, Winter’s existential jump-roping gets at the heart of how little anyone knows of each other, of how little we know of ourselves. Is there such a thing as a shared truth of a person, of a dream? What’s more sincere than leaning into life’s nonsense?

As I listen to Heavy Metal, I am overcome not just by the work at hand but by what lies ahead. There is so much more awaiting Winter that it’s almost unbearable to consider the breadth of his potential. For now, he’s looking down the barrel of two tours—one with Geese and one solo—that are sure to continue to illuminate Winter’s enormous, ethereal vocals. In his ongoing solo work, I’m hopeful to see Winter utilize the full wingspan of his voice—to trust in the big leap of himself. We’re along for the ride.

(And Cameron, if you’re reading this, we’d love to have you on. We’d like to know your thoughts on Muppets. Let’s make it happen.)