A few months before he released his debut solo album “Heavy Metal,” Cameron Winter posted an Ask Me Anything (AMA) thread to Reddit, a popular format where users ask celebrities questions about themselves.
“As a Bob Dylan fan, how do you feel about the hunk-ification of him in the new Timothee Chalamet biopic?” user Repulsive_Cash521 asked. “And why is it rated R? What will be the consequences of potential widely-released Bob Dylan smut?”
Winter managed to outdo this absurd, very online question with an answer of his own.
“The world needs to be ready for the unforeseen consequences of a hunked-up Bob Dylan revival,” Winter wrote. “Bob Dylan has been toying with his mythical status and untouchable legacy for the past 50 years similarly to how a bored prince might toy with the peasantry.”
He also called Dylan “just some weird dude who spent 7 years being dizzyingly famous.”
That sort of ironic, wise-guy humor features heavily in Winter’s persona. On his website, he lists a PO Box inside the Pentagon as his only mode of contact. On the flyer for his solo tour, the header reads “Cameron Winter” twice in different fonts, and images of ancient clay figures pepper the page, their dimensions purposefully smushed in an image editing tool. Snarky, cryptic, and crude, Winter ironically seems to be following in Dylan’s footsteps.
(And, by the way, if you’ve come to “Heavy Metal” expecting to hear the eponymous musical genre, you’ve already been fooled. The songs are as metal as Mozart.)
The deliberate coarseness of Winter’s online image speaks to the nature of his solo music. In his music, Winter tends to vacillate rapidly between absurd and achingly beautiful, sometimes one right after the other, singing, “Today I met who I’m gonna be from now on / And he’s a piece of shit, yeah.” There’s an unmistakable humor underneath all the dreariness that rescues his music from self-pitying masochism. He’s not exactly asking you to take his suffering seriously, only for you to laugh at it with him.
Though it might seem like Winter just stepped onto the scene—I’ve suddenly started hearing his music around WestCo and the Butterfields this semester—he’s been around since 2016, when he and his high school friends formed Geese. The band started getting noticed after their third album, “3D Country,” released in June 2023 to favorable reviews. Their new follow-up, “Getting Killed,” has already received media praise.
Laughing at the Apocalypse
Like any prodigious record, “Heavy Metal” manages to blend styles so smoothly that it is impossible to brand with a broad, categorical genre. Yes, “Nausicaä (Love Will Be Revealed)” has sort of a funk/soul groove to it, “Can’t Keep Everything” is a sort of folk ballad, and “Drinking Age” is perhaps a piano ballad in the singer-songwriter canon, but that’s stretching it. Due to this inscrutability, the album has a certain uncanniness on first listen. His songs seem to have no generic center, not to mention the trick of naming the album “Heavy Metal,” which immediately leads the listener down the wrong path.
One may also find the album difficult for its pandemonic sound, Winter’s incoherent singing, and the irregular song structures. On “Nina + Field of Cops,” Winter hammers out rapid tremolos on the piano as he sings, “Names are donuts on the sea / Names are peanuts in the trees / Names bid you to beg for trash.” These hardly intelligible, stream-of-consciousness thoughts build and build and spill over until finally Winter hammers out a single, clarion chord. He testifies, “Nina knows the reason, and she’s seen into the mouth / Of what it is to be a mountain.”
That song marks a significant denouement in the course of the album; whereas the first chunk of songs, from “The Rolling Stones” to “We’re Thinking the Same Thing” gives you a taste of Winter’s madness, it only really comes to a head in the final three songs. What I feel in them is a certain religious quality, with Winter teetering madly on the point between apocalypse and rebirth, chaos and tranquility. Indeed, in “Nina,” Winter moves from drooling quasi-gibberish over a noisy piano—a sonic and lyrical glossolalia—into exaltation, a moment of spiritual rebirth as he lays himself before the altar of his idol, Nina Simone. He might as well be belting “Amazing Grace” as he moves from the lost to the found.
Winter seems to explicitly avow his devotion to God in “$0,” although in sarcastic tones, of course. He croons over a vast, placid piano about “[feeling] like I’m a zero-dollar man.” Again he conjures Nina, his muse, who “knows why,” denoting the meaning of life. The song feels more resigned than any other song on the album, because it conveys the most crushing feeling of depression: being up against the wall and not knowing how to escape it. The music swells to a climax, and Winter erupts, “God is real, God is real / I’m not kidding, God is actually real.”
The piano climbs down like an angel descending from heaven. The depressive episode that begins with Cameron’s cooing at the beginning of the song, his fuck-these-people attitude, is at last resolved by a divine revelation. The tongue-in-cheek “I’m not kidding” line has become a favorite among fans of Winter and his band, but it’s not just a cheap gag or a retreat from vulnerability. Rather, it’s almost to say that, for those suffering from depression, even divine intervention is not enough; one still has to put in the effort themselves if they want to get better. What makes Cameron Winter so compelling is that he sees misery as both crushing and surmountable. He wants, just like anyone else, to emerge from the other side wearing a cruel, knowing smile.
The album’s final track, “Can’t Keep Anything,” traces a pilgrim’s path towards the unknown. Like Leonard Cohen before him, Winter borrows biblical metaphors—walking, begging, praying, dying—to imagine a friend or lover who has exhausted all of their potential. But whereas Cohen’s deep, charcoal bass gives him the sage authority of an old man, Winter’s voice is direct and still willing to compromise. At first he professes that he “can’t keep anything, not even you,” but later, he changes course: “Wherever it is I’m going, baby / You’re going too.”
Faced with the ultimate goodbye, Winter chooses to take this other person on his journey, rather than go the path of defeat alone. This moment serves as the perfect ending to an album full of frustration and melancholy. After not knowing where to turn for so long, Winter turns to a friend, or a lover—in any case, another human being—for protection. Amid all the A.I. cultism of today, when our society seems intent on summoning the omniscience of God through a computer screen, rather than finding something sacred in ourselves as human beings—an age where the self reigns supreme, when so many choose to protect their peace rather than work it out—simply leaning on another person and toughing it out together feels like a generational act of defiance.
“Heavy Metal” is deeply human, and perhaps that’s why it’s already a cult classic. Or maybe it’s the way the album spits in the face of the Gen Z condition. Winter, after all, is only 22 years old. Anxiety, loneliness, and indecision are not unique to our generation. Unique, however, is the central question of the album: When faced with uncertainty, alienation, and apocalypse, should you cry or laugh? Winter seems to say: both.
Conrad Lewis can be reached at cglewis@wesleyan.edu.
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