By Erik Xu ’28
Rating: 3.5 stars
With every passing year, there will always be certain music artists that are immediately acclaimed as the ‘greats’ of the modern music age, acclaim which becomes elevated and embedded in music history, acclaim serving as a blessing or as a pressure to the artists themselves. Given how rich indie rock history has been in the past decade, younger artists have the benefit of being able to use past trends to find new sounds for their music. The band Geese well demonstrates this throughout their discography.
Rock band Geese playing live
Geese’s clear reputation first bubbled with their post-punk record Projector, released in 2021, which contained qualities that would eventually be transformed into a different sound in 3D Country, released in 2023. This would be their breakthrough record as they squirmed into 60’s country rock, raising the volume, expression, and verbosity of their music. This overall shift presented an awkward sound on the 2024 solo record Heavy Metal, released by the lead singer of Geese, Cameron Winter, where his vocals find an extreme disquieting tone, and the songwriting becomes frustratingly forlorn.
However, the band Geese as a whole had become much more aware of what kind of distinct sound they wanted to present, eventually releasing the 2025 record Getting Killed.
Album cover for Geese’s Getting Killed, 2025
In this record, Cameron Winter writes about a protagonist ‘getting killed’ off by everything and everyone, where whatever sense of freedom and control feels less possible to find. The protagonist feels this reckless action to soothe the ‘flames’ surrounding him, one that fails miserably. He shouts on the track ‘Bow Down’: “I was in love and now I’m in hell,” the sign of emotional burden he would use to get freedom back, by never paying his taxes, breaking his own heart, and stating he would witness the music crash down as he goes back to Long Island City, where he belongs. It is an overall getting back control coming from someone that might seem like they are in shambles, perhaps from how overwhelming fame and acclaim can become, especially with all of the members of Geese being in their 20s.
As much as the songwriting carries the sense of charged anxious fervor, the melodies in the tracks tend to be what makes the record Getting Killed stand out. Certain hooks and melodic phrases are presented by Winter’s super nervy vocals and Kenneth Blume’s production, especially with tracks like the smoldering tempos that lead to the hook of ‘Husbands’, the lilting start of ‘Taxes’ along with awesome transitions, the welcoming “THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR!” by Winters and JPEGMAFIA, or the rampant instrumental of ‘Long Island City Here I Come’.
For a record that is praised with glories by everyone else in the world, Getting Killed is a strangely aversive direction from the young band that is Geese, writing about their place in an area where the spotlight is on them no matter what. This record, delivered with emotional saturation, does not oversee the rest of the band’s discography, but rather kills the rapturous echoes around it.