We’re one year removed since Geese mania took the independent music scene by storm upon the Brooklyn band releasing their “breakthrough” acclaimed third album, Getting Killed, and in turn, creating a generation-defining moment with a shift back toward rockism. A few months later, some chaotically good journalistic digging by Eliza McLamb rightfully questioned the rapid-rise flight of the band being a psyop by way of a PR blitz astroturfing positive comments and content across social media. The band has more or less dismissed any awareness on their end of knowing this would happen after they were showed the promo plan in a recent interview with Rolling Stone, but with the release of frontman Cameron Winter’s new solo live album — the classically titled Live at Carnegie Hall — the specter of a “psyop” still looms close behind.

It’s understandable why people still maintain begrudging everything related to he and his band after this. To date, Live at Carnegie Hall has received a shiny 8.9 review score and Best New Music honors over at the ‘fork, Album of the Week accolades at the site’s fellow paywalled powerhouse Stereogum, and currently sits with a combined 88 score on Metacritic. What it is not is a psyop, as much as these pages does enjoy some shady industry drama, is this album. Instead, commentariat curmudgeons need to learn how to distinguish the difference between an actual psyop and something that’s really just been a well-orchestrated artistic endeavor long in the works, regardless of how much or how little resources have been poured behind them.

Still, I get it. When news of the Carnegie Hall show broke, Pitchfork placed it on front and center as their headline story. This was the very same day that one-time Best New Music darlings Grizzly Bear announced their reunion tour albeit, if that tells you anything about who is buttering the ‘fork’s bread these days. This could, in retrospect, be viewed as every much as the kickoff point in the project’s promotional build, even if merely by virtue of signal boosting the event by its site’s staff.

On the night of the actual show, Academy Award-winning director Paul Thomas Anderson would show up to direct the entire set. We now know this has led to the making of an accompanying film (shot on 35mm, for the added pure cinema novelty) that will be receive a theatrical release this November. You can’t just invent all of this happening without a substantial amount of premeditative planning involving the artist Winter, Winter’s label Partisan Records, and PTA signing up for it in advance, and the press who adulates him continuing to feed the frenzy solidifies its success. This was the whole scope of the project, from its soft launch in the news to its release across varying mediums of physical media.

As for the artist otherwise known as Chet Chomsky and Son-John Johnson weirding out in his performance by stripping down much of the instrumentation heard throughout his earliest EP, Singles, 2024’s solo breakout Heavy Metal, and three new songs to just a flex on classical piano and a very non-classical voice, this shouldn’t fire up people the way it does and rather, be reason to just let the Geese guy cook. The musical experience at the core of Live at Carnegie Hall is meant to transcend mediums regardless in how it finds you, and in turn, complimenting Winter’s God-struck retrains on a crowd favorite like “$0” with a presentation that climaxes its intended peak spiritual potential while three new tracks in its opening soliloquy “It All Fell in the River”, Emperor XII In Shades”, and the deathly ramble “If You Turn Back Now” building toward what they might eventually become in the studio.

Whether you enjoy Winter’s music or not is a thing of subjection, but what is not is the reality of Live at Carnegie Hall. In a dark age where so much that gets put in front of us in our daily news cycle probably is a psyop — not to mention all of that influencer brainrot fed to our timelines that are typically performative for the sake of nefarious, self-serving promotion — we should appreciate an actual event that happened for what it is at face value, captured in a vessel we call art. And as a sidenote: a lot of people would have never survived living through the rollout of Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall and it shows.

Highlights: “It All Fell in the River”, “If You Turn Back Now”, “$0”

Cameron Winter’s Live at Carnegie Hall is available now on Partisan Records.

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