Geese

Ripping up the expected blueprint Geese set with their 2021 debut Projector and the cowboy rock follow-up of 2023’s 3D Country, Getting Killed puts the very idea of conventional rock structures in the band’s crosshairs. Working at a feverish clip with renowned producer Kenneth Blume over a month-long stretch, Geese emerged wielding a sharp, novel new vision for the genre, sporting wry smiles and a resolute confidence. The album was crowned the number one album of the year on numerous Best of 2025 lists including TIME, The New Yorker, The New York Times and more. The band began 2026 right where they left off, with an unwieldy, vexing SNL debut, a surprisingly intimate Tiny Desk concert and winning a BRIT Award for International Group of the Year.

 

 

Gwenifer Raymond

Wales born, Brighton-based instrumentalist Gwenifer Raymond is a celebrated champion of the

finger-picked guitar. She has drawn international acclaim for her repurposing of Mississippi blues and

John Fahey’s intricate Americana to embody her roots in rural South Wales and her interests in folk

horror and the avant garde, inventing a new form dubbed Welsh Primitive. The Guardian has

described her as a “profound talent” whilst The Observer has praised her “awe-inspiring technique

and intense musicality”, and Uncut Magazine has championed her “fast-developing talents as a composer of eerie menace.”

Gwenifer Raymond is set to release her third studio album Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark

(2025, We Are Busy Bodies), which has been preceded by Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain (2020,

Tompkins Square), a Welsh Music Prize Nominee, and You Were Never Much of a Dancer (2018,

Tompkins Square).

Gwenifer was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1985. At the age of eight her love of Nirvana’s Nevermind

prompted her to ask her parents for as guitar, and later the cover of Lead Belly’s Where Did You Sleep

Last Night from their MTV Unplugged in New York show sent her scurrying in search of whatever

recordings she could find from the roots blues gods of fingerstyle: Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Boy

Fuller, the more “eerie, threatening, almost not from this world” sounds of Skip James.

“The first time I heard Mississippi John Hurt, I just assumed there were a couple of guys playing on that recording,” she says.

“When I discovered that it was just one guy playing guitar I immediately wanted

to figure out how to play like that myself. It’s just such a full sound, so fully realized and covering this

wide sonic range. It seemed to offer so many possibilities.”

While playing around South Wales in punk bands as a drummer and guitarist – in thrall to Pixies,

Butthole Surfers, The Fall and The Velvet Underground as well as Dylan and Neil Young – she taught

herself blues guitar and Appalachian folk from the books of Stefan Grossman and practiced the

clawhammer banjo style until it became second nature. Then, at 16, she found a tutor in Cardiff who

taught her the famous alternative thumb technique and also introduced her to the American

Primitive work of Fahey. Raymond set about merging these Americana learnings with the pent-up

energy of her teenage punk years and her fascination with folk horror classics such as The Wicker

Man and The Blood on Satan’s Claw to create a sinuous, primeval and cascading British blues all her

own.

Once she’d completed an MA and PhD in Astrophysics at Cardiff University and moved to Brighton to

become an AI and video game programmer, Raymond was discovered by instrumental guitarist

Doctor Turtle playing open-mic nights and – via the circuitous trans-Atlantic journey of her demo –

signed to San Francisco’s Tompkins Square Records in 2017. Her first proper gig was at the Thousand

Incarnations of the Rose Festival in Maryland, where she hung with heroes such as Glenn Jones,

Marisa Anderson, Daniel Bachman and Peter Walker and was presented by Henry Kaiser with a 1880s

Joseph Bohmann guitar which she feels may be possessed by some fingerpicking demon.“I’m not saying I’ve seen it toss chairs across the room but there’s definitely some presence to that

guitar,” she says of an instrument used sparingly across her albums, alongside her Waterloo WL-14L,

a Tricone National Resonator and other guest guitars. “You can feel it when you pick it up. It always

seems to bestow such huge performances.”

Her 2018 debut album You Never Were Much of a Dancer – with its references to hangmen and

sackcloth, ashes and blood – was steeped in noir Americana, but being asked to score the 1907 silent

French horror film about a Satanic magician The Red Spectre shifted her folk-structured perspective

towards classical movements and the European avant garde.

Recorded in her Brighton flat during lockdown in 2020 to the sounds of Moondog, Erik Satie and her

neighbour’s washing machine, her second album, Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain – a reference

to the UFOs spotted over a mountain near her childhood home – lost itself in the misty Welsh

landscapes of her youth, and entranced the world beyond. It garnered huge acclaim as pioneering a

Welsh Primitive style and set Raymond apart as a unique fingerstyle talent.

“It felt like I was emulating the specific guitarists I looked up to less, and had started to incorporate my own specific

musical eccentricities, ” she says. Having toured Europe, the US and Canada with the likes of Michael Chapman, Michael Hurley, The

Handsome Family, Lankum, Charlie Parr, Richard Dawson, Ryley Walker and Squid, and played major

festivals including WOMAD, Green Man, End of the Road and Transmusicales in France, Raymond

recorded her latest album Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark in similar fashion; exploring textures

and following threads alone in her flat’s home studio, trying to get a sonic grip on a world spinning

out of control. The album is a hybrid of the ancient and the futuristic where, in Raymond’s

multi-dimensional finger-work, the arcane etchings of occult folk horror fuse with the unfathomable

equations of the cosmos, the earthly meeting the stellar on some far-off event horizon.