Cameron Winter - Heavy Metal

Harry Lowther

I have to admit, off the bat, that I spent some time looking for another album to review. I write at the end of 2025, as best-of year lists, wrapped, and any other number of reasons to look back over the previous twelve months are in the atmosphere, and Cameron Winter is on many of them at least once, if not twice when you add his band Geese’s album, Getting Killed. And maybe it’s a genuine desire to recommend music to people that they don’t already know, or maybe I’m not used to good stuff actually getting popular, or, and this is possibly the most likely, I just think I’m too cool to have the same pick as everybody else out there, but Heavy Metal is just the choice my heart wants to write about. In time, maybe I’ll look back on this pick with embarrassment once the disappointing second album comes out and we’re all sick of it. But it’s the album I haven’t stopped listening to in 2025. The kind of album where, on your second or third or twelfth month of listening, something else jumps out at you that previously had been just another part of a song. And with all that being said, the album didn’t even come out in 2025. It came out in December 2024, too late for last year’s lists. But let’s face it, this is what I was listening to all year.

Cameron Winter’s lyrics particularly lend themselves to this, to obsessing over and teasing out meaning from a single image, a conga line a thousand chickens long, or a salesmen’s teeth. Maybe the fascination comes from the tension between sincerity and irony, present not just in the lyrics but in their delivery. Sometimes, actually quite often, it’s hard to tell if Winter is in on a joke the rest of us are only getting halfway towards, the trick never fully revealed. His vocal style, changing at different points in every song, strays from singer-songwriter straightforwardness to a quivering falsetto that’s either come out of some post-ego death purity of pure feeling, or Monty Python-esque silliness. That it doesn’t immediately pull (most) listeners out of the music completely is testament to how unique the whole package sounds. Songs are delicately balanced constructions that would topple over and kill you if you removed one small piece of decoration from them. And the title, Heavy Metal, a misnomer for an album that distinctly isn’t heavy metal at all, taking the title instead from the lyric ‘I am fully of heavy metals, I’m a heavy metal man.’ 

And in spite of all of that, the music remains damn accessible. For every slice of surrealism, there’s a line that reaches out of the song and speaks to universal experience. ‘Love takes miles, love takes years’ is a recognizable feeling for anyone who’s ever put work into a relationship, and a surprisingly mature lyric to have on a debut album, normally the reserve of youthful yearning or reactionary revenge tracks. 

Or, you know, maybe it’s all a guy saying random shit in a silly voice over songs made up of random elements.

A word for Geese, too, Winter’s band that precedes the solo career. While still on a course that sticks closer to classic rock music, 2025’s Getting Killed sounds more similar to Heavy Metal than it does to their previous releases, signaling a pulling together in the same direction, a cohesive vision that’s distinctive enough that it will undoubtedly inspire imitators. Expect to find them at your local open mic at any point in 2026.

While Geese, however, appear to take inspiration from the 70s, Winter’s solo project feels more at home amongst those seminal 60s artists like Dylan, The Beatles - the later stuff, you know, low expectation stuff like that. Starting off with a trio of hit single quality songs, Heavy Metal then delves deeper, more introspective, more exploratory. The album is impressively cohesive, the kind of album that works beyond a collection of songs, encompassing a journey towards god, or towards some kind of God, or maybe towards something beyond such an idea, an epiphany that there are no more epiphanies, as when we reach the freewheeling ‘god is actually real’ part of $0 it feels like a natural end-point. And then we go further with ‘Can’t Keep Anything.’ See, Sergeant Pepper is in there, if you know what I mean. I don’t fully see where you’re going, but I’m going too.