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Every year, we ask our contributors to select the best artist and best new artist of the year, a question that admittedly comes with a lot of ambiguity and qualifiers. Yet, every year, we somehow settle on some concrete answers. For best artist of the year the answer was obvious. For best new artist, the voting pool was more diverse but one artist’s name came up more than others. Enjoy essays about both below!
Best Artist of 2025: Geese
James Austin Johnson doing an impression on SNL. New Radicals’ Gregg Alexander calling them the coolest thing since the White Stripes. Appearing in an Xbox advertisement covering Bruce Springsteen. Paul Thomas Anderson and Benny Safdie filming a show at Carnegie Hall. Fat White Family hating them. Nick Cave loving them. Billy Corgan seeming indifferent to them, but thinking they should fight Goose. Such is the 2025 of Cameron Winter and Geese.
Would GETTING KILLED have become the decade’s de facto crossover indie album with such intense vigor if Cameron Winter’s HEAVY METAL didn’t spread like wildfire over the beginning part of the year? I suppose that’s the thing we’ll never know. But according to Winter, his solo music getting released at all was an uphill battle that almost didn’t happen. Was the success of 2023’s 3D COUNTRY enough to pave the way for co-signs from the likes of Patti Smith, Vampire Weekend, and Jack Black? It feels unlikely.
That fame acceleration over one 12-month period will be studied forever. Each debate about privilege and New York City kids with money and being industry plants, each discussion about selling out and co-worker music, any comments about his voice — all a window into what the MEET ME IN THE BATHROOM era would have been like with X. Can Geese get bigger than this? Will Cameron Winter ascend to new heights? Is this the best music we’ll have ever heard from these respective acts? We’re in somewhat uncharted territory a quarter into this century. Surely it so quickly crossed over into the mainstream that whatever credibility and cool factor surrounded the band for the last two years has vanished? There won’t be a THIRD GQ profile on this band, will there?
The unprecedented nature of the band’s rise in popularity is mostly why they sit here as our Artist of the Year — to be transparent, some of the ballots from our staff that submitted Geese did so with a sigh and an eye-roll (“I mean, I guess it has to be Geese”). Even those that loved GETTING KILLED and HEAVY METAL are beginning to feel the fatigue. And that’s to say nothing about either album, the former prickling the edges of 3D COUNTRY’S madcap roots rock, the latter a hang-on-every-syllable Gen Z rendition of Tom Waits’s CLOSING TIME. Both are unlikely timbres to break through, any way you look at it. It exploded at double the speed of MJ Lenderman with half of the commercial appeal. It defies expectation.
And yet … anyone who went to see Geese on the 3D COUNTRY tour could tell you that, against all odds, the show connects with young people. In October of 2023 at the Echoplex, I watched a sold-out room of mostly 18-to-22-year-old kids freak out for an hour straight to the helpless, bugged-out cries of the band that they’ve seemingly anointed as representatives of their generation — good, bad, or ugly. While I’ve been to plenty of shows over those two years that capture the spirit of youth culture, none have conjured the stranglehold the same way. The cool kids have been ready for Geese to be the biggest band on planet Earth for two years now. For the first time in a long time, the rest of the world listened.
Best New Artist of 2025: Gelli Haha
It’s all right there in the “Bounce House” music video. Kaleidoscopic shapes and colors folding in on themselves, a dizzying array of performers and party people bringing an uncanny, jolly atmosphere to a song that pulses with the exuberance of a confetti cannon going off. Featuring not actors or musicians, but characters like “Sisi Haha” or “Juju Haha,” the credits reveal a sense of what was to come: “A Gelliverse Production.”
Nothing about the world of Gelli Haha is created without a considerable amount of thought — from the live show to the social media presence to the music itself. And while it’s a bit more homespun than the A-listers dominating Top 40 radio, we’re watching an indie artist capture the universality of pop music and the magic therein with a true DIY ethos for the first time in a long time — and actually find success! The grinding, sultry beat of “Spit,” the starry, cosmic cries of “Funny Music,” the quiet, heartening phantom nosedive of “Johnny,” each more undeniable than the last.
But, more than anything else, the songs on SWITCHEROO are … fun! It wasn’t about charts or coolness or streaming, it’s just about explosively fun, bright, brilliantly composed pop songs. When I watched the “Bounce House” music video the day it dropped with no context around the project, it seemed in the best ways like I was dropping into something that had been around for years — the world of Gelli Haha feels like it was here long before you and I, and the further into 2025 we went it felt like it would be here long after, too.
I write this days before the group is set to open for Magdalena Bay on New Year’s Eve. The era of a truly DIY Gelliverse is sunsetting. But it’s time to lock in and wonder what the dawn of a new phase of the Gelliverse will be.
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