In December, I wrote a column defending music websites and publications that publish year-end lists before the end of the year. I justified this for three reasons: 1) December is mostly bereft of notable new releases; 2) Readers check out by mid-December; 3) Nobody remembers what goes on year-end lists anyway.
I still stand by the second and third justifications. But as it pertains to 2024, I can no longer vouch for the first justification. New evidence has come to light. What’s worse is that when I wrote that column, the album that nullified my reasoning had already been out for a week.
I refer to Heavy Metal, the debut solo LP by a prodigiously talented 22-year-old singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist named Cameron Winter. The record dropped the same day as my year-end list for 2024, which of course at this point is just irrelevant trivia. A decade from now, when I look back on my favorite albums of that year, I suspect that Heavy Metal will be among the standouts. For these past few frigid and tumultuous months, Winter’s songs — grand, idiosyncratic, funny, disturbing, densely wordy, and deeply moving – have remained lodged in my cranium. It feels like a major statement by an emerging artist, and there’s also reason to think that he will never make an album like it ever again. But for now, it sounds new and fresh and feels ancient and profound. Heavy Metal is special, and if you’re not yet on board, I heartily recommend making early 2025 a Cameron Winter winter.
Before Heavy Metal, I knew Winter as the frontman of Geese, a Brooklyn post-punk band that initially garnered critical raves for their 2021 debut Projector, made when Winter was still in his teens. Admittedly, I was skeptical at first — Projector sounded, superficially at least, like an on-the-nose pastiche of the sort of “Brooklyn post-punk band” music that always attracts positive press from Brooklyn-based music writers. But setting aside the hometown hype, it felt a little generic. I tended to agreewith my colleague Ian Cohen’s assessment in Pitchfork: “If Geese were in the middle of a four-band bill at the Mercury Lounge in 2002, would we remember them now?” The answer to that rhetorical question was self-evident.
Or was it? The next Geese record, 2023’s 3D Country, marked a dramatic shift. This band of baby-faced urbanites left the city for the desert (metaphorically speaking) where they ingested loads of psychedelic drugs (perhaps not metaphorically speaking) and produced one of the wildest and most exhilarating rock records of the 2020s. It’s hard to describe 3D Country without devolving into a word salad of hackneyed classic-rock references. It’s like Can’t Buy A Thrill if it was more like Goats Head Soup! It’s like Black Sabbath’s Vol. 4 if it were covered by Phish on Halloween in 1997! Each song explodes out of the speakers with a barrage of heavy riffs, noodly guitar solos, drum-circle breakdowns, and wailing gospel backing vocals. At the center was Winter, whose love-it-or-hate-it vocals — a combination of Julian Casablancas at his drunkest, Jeff Mangum at his most messianic, and Nick Cave in undead sex-goth crooner mode — imbued everything with larger-than-life, charismatic swagger.
Sometime after making 3D Country, Winter started on Heavy Metal, which he claims took him a year and a half. Not that we should take this at face value. The pranksterish playfulness that manifested on the Geese record carried over to the press materials for Winter’s solo LP, which he says was recorded “in a series of Guitar Centers across the New York tri-state area” with a supporting cast the includes a five-year-old bassist and a distant (and disowned) relative of John Lennon.
More credible is Winter’s assertion that these songs came out of a period when he was obsessed with Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, as well as a literary phase centered on Jack Kerouac, various Beat poets, James Joyce and Rimbaud. As he put it in a recent interview, “I went to the pretentious stuff really fast.” And that plays to the benefit of Heavy Metal, which is loaded with surreal lyrics that at turns are grotesque and comic. On the opening track “The Rolling Stones,” he sings about how he “will keep breaking cups until my left hand looks wrong,” the first act on an ongoing spiritual journey he likens to the twisted paths taken by doomed seekers such as Brian Jones and John Hinckley. (Later in the song, he makes a deep cut allusion to Interpol’s Turn On The Bright Lights — you can’t take the Brooklyn out of the boy, after all.)
“Cancer Of The Skull” is even more striking. Like much of Heavy Metal, it’s a dirge played on acoustic guitar and piano, with a twanging jaw harp and punch-drunk horn section arriving in the back half for extra flavor. It sounds like something that Robert Altman could have played over the image of Warren Beatty’s frozen corpse at the end of McCabe And Mrs. Miller. “I can’t reach cancer of the 80s / I was beat with ukuleles,” he drawls. “Oh, songs are a hundred ugly babies / I can’t feed.”
The old-school singer-songwriters trapping might suggest a stripped-down, folkie effort. But while Heavy Metal doesn’t have the instrumental firepower of Winter’s work with Geese, it actually packs a much heavier emotional wallop. Whereas 3D Country occasionally has a goofy edge, there’s an unwavering intensity on Heavy Metal that builds to a series of near-unbearable crescendos of feeling and catharsis. Three songs are particularly powerful: “Drinking Age,” a piano ballad with a pained, soaring vocal in which Winter pointedly wails, “Today I met who I’m gonna be from now / And he’s a piece of shit, yeah”; “Try As I May,” a surprisingly straight-forward and earnest love song with a repetitive organ riff reminiscent of Harry Nilsson’s “One”; and “$0,” a beautiful neo-classical number that climaxes with a remarkable rant insisting that “God is real / God is real / I’m not kidding, God is actually real.”
That part of the song ends with Winter reiterating, “I’m not kidding this time.” And I believe him. If 3D Country was Winter’s “wander the desert on acid” record, Heavy Metal is what happens the day after, when you preach your wild-eyed personal truth to the world. And let me tell you: This kid has a lot — wisdom and otherwise — to share.
