NELSONVILLE, Ohio – The Nelsonville Music Festival has become an indie rock barometer.
It has reached the point where a band knows it made one of last year’s best records if it’s been named a headliner of this year’s festival.
This year’s lineup features Geese and Wednesday, the biggest one-two punch of indie “with a capital I” rock acts to emerge in the past year.
Geese and Wednesday were all over the year-end best records lists, with the former’s “Getting Killed” and the latter’s “Bleeds” hailed for their originality.
Few festivals are in the category of NMF.
It’s a small category that specializes in edgy indie bands and Americana acts with some world music thrown in. And it’s the only festival that takes place in a remote and bucolic place and with such a laid-back spirit.
This year’s NMF will take place June 18-20 at Snow Fork Event Center – a large green spot with a mobile Wi-Fi connection on the edge of a forest – near the tiny Appalachian town of Buchtel.
It’s about 15 minutes from Athens, home of Ohio University, and three hours from Youngstown.
The fest gets a new twist this year that no other three-day event has adopted: It will take place Thursday through Saturday, instead of its usual Friday-Sunday.
Most NMF regulars – and there are plenty of them – called for the change. It will make it easier to stay late Saturday and have no trouble making it to work Monday morning.
The new dates should cause another improvement, as the fest can now end with a bang.
In past years, the festival ended early Sunday evening, with the final act taking the stage around 6 p.m. This allowed attendees to head home early. But it also meant the festival ended with a quiet fadeout, and only a remnant of the audience staying until the end.
The day-to-day lineup for this year’s event still hasn’t been released, but Geese will be one of the headliners.
Geese is an enigma. The Brooklyn band is led by the mercurial Cameron Winter, who lends an air of unpredictability to each performance. He’s a modern-day Jim Morrison at times, who sings his often cryptic lyrics with a steady growl.
Geese songs range from melodic to frenetic, and their new album is a 45-minute head trip.
I’ve seen the act three times – twice as the opener for a major star and once on a side stage at NMF a few years ago.
Being an opener is a mixed blessing that is burdened by a short time slot, no-frills staging and an audience that might not be interested. Catching Geese when it’s not in someone else’s spotlight makes a huge difference. This year’s NMF will mark the first time I’ll see the band as a festival headliner, and I’m expecting something intense.
Winter, by the way, also put out an excellent solo album last year. Dubbed “Heavy Metal,” the release also nibbled at the best-of lists.
Although Winter is only 24 years old, he is earning great levels of respect from critics.
He reached a career landmark quite early in age when he played a solo concert at Carnegie Music Hall in December to promote “Heavy Metal.”
As a sign of his growing acclaim, film director Paul Thomas Anderson – whose 2025 movie “One Battle After Another” won the Oscar Award for Best Picture – was at the concert and shot it for a future documentary.
Uncut magazine critic Andy Cush was full of praise in his review of Winter’s performance, in which the artist performed alone on a grand piano.
“If one were inclined to cynicism about the hasty coronation of this young songwriter, this show at Carnegie Hall – and the high-profile concert film that seems to be on the way – might provide vindication of one’s doubt,” Cush wrote. “OK, the kids love him, but surely he doesn’t already deserve all this? But he really does. He performs alone at the piano, stripping away the layered focals and magpie instrumental arrangements of ‘Heavy Metal,’ communicating bare emotion through his singing even when his lyrics offer surreal feints and artful obfuscations.”
Wednesday, which features guitarist MJ Lenderman (who played a solo show at NMF last year), fits more squarely into the indie world, especially with the pretty but unhinged vocals of Karly Hartzman.
The “Bleeds” album picks up from the band’s excellent 2023 release, “Rat Saw God.”
It has an alt-country style with an occasional bit of raging noise. The two disparate approaches can seem at odds with each other, but that’s the way Hartzman likes it.
“We played a festival in Portland, and this drunk guy came up to me and said, ‘My one piece of advice for you is make a different band for your noisy stuff and your country stuff,’” Hartzman recalled during an interview with Variety. “And I was like, ‘Please shut up.’”
The NMF lineup also includes Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band. Like Geese and Wednesday, this Louisville, Ky., outfit also drew best-of-the-year attention for its 2025 album, “New Threats from the Soul.”
Also performing will be blues artist Marcus King; British folk greats Gillian Welch and David Rawlings; gospel-soul legend Mavis Staples; indie-folk act Fruit Bats; and Mon Rovia, the ultra-melodic singer-songwriter from Liberia whose hit single “Heavy Foot” sounds like an Appalachian folk tune (and by the way, Monrovia is the capital of his African home nation).
In addition to Geese, Welch and Rawlings and Marcus King are expected to headline the other two nights of the festival.
To see the complete lineup and to buy tickets, camping passes and parking permits, go to NelsonvilleFest.org.
Pictured at top: Geese will be one of the headliners of the Nelsonville Music Festival.