Live Review: Cameron Winter @ The Forum, Melbourne

And there he is, the $0 man of the moment. Stepping onto the stage casually, it’s Cameron Winter: 23, hair greasy, singlet and jeans. He sits down silently, back to the crowd, casually—noisily—adjusts the mic stand. Just a piano, a microphone, a spotlight. And then he plays.

He plays for an hour straight, breaks few, between-song banter—spoken in a drawl that sounds like Austin Butler mid-escape from Elvis method—brief and rare. He plays for an hour straight, but the time bends.

The songs on the Geese frontman’s wild debut LP, Heavy Metal, are already so impressionistic, so slippery and sinuous, changing shape and meter with oddness and fluidity. But here, on stage, they change constantly: recorded versions pulled in new directions, met with new improvisations; the new unreleased material that makes up half the show still being discovered, felt out.

The songs are surreal, sometimes silly, always wildly beautiful. His voice is quite the instrument, at once a friend and a weapon. It’s big, soaring, strange, unafraid. Singing the kind of words that few others do; songs whose lyrics converse with his other songs, Nina and baseball and Saturday and $0 man motifs that trickle across tracks, stitching the whole—an album, a show—into a singular work, a song-cycle sprung from the one well.

He’s got bars. ”It’s too bad what happened to Jesus/Thank God our Friday evening survived,” he sings, on a new jam called Emperor XIII in Shades. “You were born to break my big hairy football arms/Like clean windows kill the birds,” he carols, on the beloved Try As I May.

The latter arrives second in the set, a welcome for a crowd that has arrived early, remains silent while he plays, and turns instantly voluminous when a song is done. The venue was full early for an opener apt in its mixture of comedy, profundity and daring: Jing Tao, a pint-sized Year 7 pianist whose classical recital gave off big maestro-takes-over-the-piano-in-the-shopping-centre energy, like someone sitting an AMEB exam in front of 1500 people.

The crowd is locked in, the vibes high. Geesemania may be the story of late-2025, but Winter solo is for the real heads, the zealots and believers. This show sold out in a snap, six months ago, before Getting Killed cemented Geese’s ascendant status, their crossover coronation. Geese feel like they’re for everyone; Winter feels like he’s just for you. It’s what creates a cult following, makes it feel, in turn, like you’re a cult member—attending a communal worship, a ritual, a séance, a celebration.

You’re there—in the Forum, a former revival church filled with history—to celebrate, and bear witness to, a musician who feels wholly original. Comparisons (Bill Fay? Jeff Mangum? Rufus Wainwright? Judee Sill? Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou?) don’t feel right, seem ultimately pointless. But the person he reminds me most of is Joanna Newsom: a 1-of-1; a prodigy grown into an icon, in command of instrument and language, whose unique songs unspool as rhythmic tumbles, fluid and expressive, full of poetry and playfulness, wordplay and jokes.

If you’ve invested in Heavy Metal, spun it over and over, spelunked deep into its shadows, Winter’s here to deliver the hits, albeit playing the familiar in less-than-familiar fashion. Love Takes Miles is grand and romantic, and it was met with the most rapturous response. Drinking Age stretches out long, its pauses drawn into stretches of pin-drop silence, played for lulz and heartache, drunk on its big feelings (“today I met who I’m gonna be from now on/and he’s a piece of shit” is quite the set-up/punchline). Nina + Field of Cops feels vast, bruised, summoning both bafflement and awe.

But it’s the incredible array of new songs that feel like the real revelation; it shows that Winter’s first solo album wasn’t some fluke occurrence, some one-off miracle never to be recaptured. I Don’t Wanna and If You Turn Back Now (the latter played as a single-song encore) are each rich in words, heavy texts to pore over and puzzle out, songs that roll on on a current strong.

The show opens, unexpectedly, with a tune titled It All Fell in the River, an emotional bloodletting whose rawness and openness set the tenor. “It all fell in the river, and the tears fell at last,” Winter croons, on close; in a song that feels full of fear, freighted with grief.

The show closes, a little more expectedly, with $0, an unlikely but undeniable anthem. There’s a kid in the crowd in a homemade t-shirt covered with the song’s lyrics, which seem even more unlikely when seen in black-and-white, or at least blue texta on white cotton, proudly worn amongst the knowing throng.

“God is real, God is real,” Winter wails, because of course he does; and in this moment, there’s the gig’s sole instant of stage-ops flourish, the single spotlight giving way to a fully-lit stage, bright and theatrical and heavenly. “I’m not kidding, God is actually real,” he implores, again and again. The line sticks, unites, and brings the unholy crowd together in a moment of holiness.

When the show’s over, and the kissed crowd gathers in the gutters outside the Forum, traffic bends around the human bodies spilling out onto city streets, young men spontaneously sing the God-is-real lines, loud and into the night. They don’t mean them in the literal sense, most likely, and God’s actual veracity matters not, really. Because these true believers are devoted to another.