Geese live at Reading Festival 2026: an apocalyptic show amid a biblical downpour

“Don’t drink the tent water,” mumbles Geese frontman Cameron Winter. “It’s not good for you.” Rain is cascading down the sides of the Gallery tent amid a truly biblical downpour at Reading Festival. At least the 24-year-old has dressed for the weather, donning a black raincoat in lieu of the white vest that became his onstage uniform earlier this year.

In certain lights, the jacket’s high neck looks like a priest’s dog collar, which is fitting given the dizzying number of religious references threaded through the Brooklyn four-piece’s game-changing 2025 album ‘Getting Killed’, as images of crucifixes, serpents and apocalyptic horsemen tumble out in a fabulously unhinged stream-of-consciousness.

If Winter were ranting on the street corner about “kneeling on the turnpike” with an “angel down my throat”, you’d probably give him a wide berth. As it is, he’s drawn a devoted congregation to the tent, like a travelling preacher who’s rolled into town with intoxicating tales of eternal damnation. And Geese sure know how to get the people going, preceding the set with a heart-pumping video montage of sporting triumphs that also includes the Mitchell and Webb sketch in which the former bellows at you to ‘WATCH THE FOOTBALL!”

The band open their sermon with the brooding plod of ‘Husbands’, which Winter mucks about with a little, mumbling unintelligibly before the song unfurls into its expansive, impossibly beautiful coda and abruptly ends. He’s in a mischievous mood, deadpanning the surreal, horror movie lyrics of Trinidad (“My daughters are dead / My wife’s in the shed / My husband’s burning lead / The rest are force-fed or else baked into bread”) as if each line ends in a question mark. It’s like he’s hearing them for the first time and is trying to work out what the hell he’s singing about.

Elsewhere, he delivers an untranscribable war-cry midway through a scything ‘100 Horses’ and pantomimes that he’s about to say something before theatrically abandoning the thought and launching into ‘2122’’s “Get out, get under!” chant instead. Guitarist Emily Green similarly ad-libs a gnarly riff before the explosive “THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR!” breakdown of ‘Trinidad’.

This isn’t quite as incendiary a show as Geese’s last UK date at the Eventim Apollo back in March, though it has its own punch-drunk charm, with the band sounding more settled into the material. After all, as the kids going nuts in the circle pit prove, they’re preaching to the converted.

Geese played:

‘Husbands’
‘Getting Killed’
‘Crusade’
‘100 Horses’
‘Half Real’
‘2122’
‘Cobra’
‘Bow Down’
‘Au Pays du Cocaine’
‘Taxes’
‘Trinidad’

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