A Very Cameron Winter
On the best music of 2024-25
In January of this year, I wrote about a new record, released in December 2024, by a guy seemingly few people had ever heard of:
The album I am listening to now is Cameron Winter’s Heavy Metal. In fact, I cannot stop listening to this album. Like — what is going on here? What is he doing with his voice? Is this Tom Waits doing a Justin Vernon impression? Astral Weeks as performed by the guy from New Radicals? Is this a perfect album? I need to keep listening.
The very same day, Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee, whose album was my favorite music of 2024, wrote in a similar vein:
I spent a little time in Durham last week and while there Brad showed me the Cameron Winter album Heavy Metal. It has quickly consumed my mind and emotions and all of the empty time and space in all this travel I’ve been doing. I don’t even really think I know how to talk about it. It feels hyperbolic to call it brilliant. It’s something else. There’s a casualness and stupidity to its complete and total airtight perfection. Brad said it sounds like freedom. I couldn’t agree more.
By the time Winter’s other band, Geese, released Getting Killed in September, I’d spent nine months listening to barely any other artist, and Winter had become as close to a “rock and roll sensation” as is possible in 2025. In Atlanta, secondary-market tickets to Geese were going for more than $200. (I declined.) In New York and Los Angeles, the going price was about $400. A few weeks ago, Winter played solo to a sold-out Carnegie Hall, with Michael Stipe and Trey Anastasio in attendance while Paul Thomas Anderson and Benny Safdie filmed the performance. (The LA show was reportedly attended by Bono, Beck, and Chappell Roan, among others.)
I mention all this not (necessarily) to say “I told you so,” but mostly to point out that I was right about the New Radicals:
As for how Cameron Winter became Gen Z’s rock icon, you can read features everywhere from GQ to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. For my part, I’ve been putting off writing about Cameron Winter. Maybe I haven’t wanted to appear opportunistic, or maybe I’ve been reluctant to overanalyze his relatively limited output, though there’s plenty worth exploring: on a technical level, as Nick Cave suggested, Getting Killed is as much a percussion showcase as anything else; and on a cultural level, yes, the manic discourse surrounding Geese and Winter in particular can be interpreted as cynical or scene-y.
So I’m not sure there’s more to say, other than Cameron Winter does not seem to take his overnight celebrity very seriously.
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Besides releasing his debut album directly after all the best-of 2024 music reviews had already been written, he’s also claimed that Heavy Metal was partly recorded in the back seat of a taxi and that the bassist was a five-year-old. In October he covered “Dancing in the Dark” for an Xbox commercial (“This gun’s for hire...”). He’s handsome in a fey, sunken-eyed sort of way. He looks like he could be descended from elves, or possibly George Harrison.
Per my above reaction, the initial conversation around Heavy Metal was Winter as a singer. Did he have a good voice? Then again, what counts as a good voice in popular music? Does Michael Stipe have a conventionally good voice? Does Nick Cave? I think Winter actually does have a lot of depth and range, but he also seems to know that the mark of a great rock vocalist is how well you can, when necessary, sing badly. Think of Van Morrison’s performance of “Caravan” on The Last Waltz, or the way Mick Jagger will frequently just strut and pout his way through an entire verse. More than a few people have compared Winter’s more cartoonish yawping to Adam Sandler, which I interpret as another way of saying that Winter has lovingly appropriated all the bombast of classic rock without sacrificing a sense of humor. At times he sounds downright ghoulish, slurring and swallowing syllables as if he was performing the lead in a mumblecore musical. He begins “$0” by imitating, I believe, a theremin.
He can also write. Two lyrics in particular stand out, not for their eloquence but for their rawness. “There’s a bomb in my car!” Winter screams on the chorus of “Trinidad.” (Getting Killed was recorded in Los Angeles during the January wildfires and shortly after New Year’s Eve, when fourteen people were killed in the French Quarter and a bomb went off inside a Cybertruck on the Vegas Strip.)
The other lyric marks the apex of Heavy Metal and of my music listening experience this year.
God is real, God is real I’m not kidding, God is actually real I’m not kidding this time I think God is actually for real God is real, God is actually real God is real, I wouldn’t joke about this I’m not kidding this time
Other New Music I Liked in 2025
Hamilton Leithauser, This Side of the Island: One of my favorite pastimes from the few years I lived in New York was the occasional weekend beer-run. On warm, sunny afternoons I’d walk fifteen minutes from our apartment to a Rite Aid on Hudson Avenue, where by some miracle I could buy a twelve-pack of Miller High Life for $10. From there I’d walk back to our apartment and up to the rooftop. Strictly speaking, our lease prohibited anyone from going up there, but everyone in the building ignored that rule; and besides, as the fourth occupant of a three-bedroom unit, I was never on the lease, strictly speaking.
So as the sun set I’d look out over the world-historic metropolis with my cheap, golden lagers and contemplate my place in it, like some wistful buffoon with nebulous ambitions and negligible prospects: the pretender to the crown of a pile of old burrito wrappers.
Anyway, listening to Hamilton Leithauser always reminds me of New York. I love it.
Wednesday, Bleeds: With the notable exception of “Wasp,” this is a more laid-back, countrified album than Rat Saw God. My first thought was The Flying Burrito Brothers — music for hanging out. Where Addison Rae has “Diet Pepsi,” Wednesday has “Phish Pepsi”: “We watched a Phish concert and Human Centipede / Two things I now wish I had never seen.”
Dove Ellis, Blizzard: If 2024 was MJ Lenderman’s breakout and 2025 was Cam Winter’s, maybe 2026 will be the year of Dove Ellis. The Jeff Buckley resemblance is uncanny — which means the songwriting can get a little treacly — but the man can sing. Another impressive cultural export from Ireland.
Hannah Frances, Keeper of the Shepherd (2024) and Nested in Tangles (2025): Cheating here, but I really want to highlight Hannah Frances. Think latter-day Fleet Foxes, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks — haunting and weird, with a soaring alto voice that hovers over an open-tuned guitar-led ensemble. Good excuse to use the word oneiric. Start with “Vacant Intimacies.”