Geese’s Cameron Winter on their ‘SNL’ performance backlash: “It depressed the shit out of me”

Geese frontman Cameron Winter has responded to the backlash surrounding the band’s Saturday Night Live performance, saying the reaction “depressed the shit out of [him]”.

The Brooklyn group made their SNL debut back in January in support of their acclaimed third album, ‘Getting Killed’ ( NME ‘s Number One record of 2025 ).

They delivered live rendtions of ‘Au Pays du Cocaine’ and ‘Trinidad’ from the LP.

READ MORE: Geese live at Reading Festival 2026: an apocalyptic show amid a biblical downpour During a new interview with Rolling Stone , Winter addressed what the publication described as “confused and hostile comments from viewers unfamiliar with Geese’s game” after their appearance on the huge US variety show.

“It really fucked me up just how hard people took it,” he replied.

“Of course, there were plenty of music-nerd people who loved it, but I felt like the reason they loved it was almost because it was sticking it to these average people who just turn on SNL after work.” Winter continued: “It depressed the shit out of me, because that’s not what I was trying to do.

It’s not like I wanted to play a fucking song in a weird time signature that’s really loud and repetitive, and then just be like, ‘Ha, ha, you don’t get it like we do’.

“That’s stupid.

But a lot of what we do gets seen as that.

I don’t know how to fix that.” The frontman said it’s “hard” to balance these concerns when making new music, expressing his desire to create something unique and also accessible.

“I used to write songs with interesting, difficult almost, chords in them, and now it’s like I-IV-V until the cows come home,” he shared.

“It’s actually getting worse and worse.

It’s like the fucking rut is getting deeper and deeper, because then I do a ii chord, and I’m just like, ‘Ew.

What are you, fucking Keith Jarrett, you piece of shit?’” At the time of Geese’s SNL performance, The Mirror US quoted one viewer who posted on X/Twitter: “Congrats to Geese on making SNL history as the undisputed worst musical guest of all time.” Someone else said they sounded like “a stoned cover band doing a soundcheck”.