Bring me death or bring me actually not death but some kind of other release. Chat search up how to get killed but maybe also live resplendently first and at the same time? What do you do if you and your friends from high school hear a rhapsody somewhere deep inside yourselves, but before you can let it out Pitchfork names it on a list of the ‘Most Anticipated Things from the Ether for 202n+1’? You release Getting Killed.

The problem for any declared saviour of indie-rock is that it never went away, but by a pressure factor of 8 tons per square inch, these bands are doomed by legacy music media to sputter as the car bomb of expectations fails to go off. 

That’s where Geese sits currently. Two acclaimed records, followed by frontman Cameron Winter releasing the best singer-songwriter album since Punisher made that inevitable. This band’s last effort, 3D Country, melded golden era rock and roll with prophetic visions skating across all major mythologies. The record is decidedly pagan. That being said, if you’ve ever watched videos of megachurch attendees convulsing as they speak in tongues you would recognise a symmetry between those clips and Winter’s shouts of “Voodoo Balarama Baba Yaga I’m taking my love to the outside!”. 

3D Country proved that everything old can be new again and not suck, and the sprawling details of Winter’s Heavy Metal drew from Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Bill Callahan, and the sparser moments of Fiona Apple. In combination, they raised major questions about how Getting Killed would sound while generating the very specific and giddy excitement that only comes when you feel you’re listening to the next biggest thing.

Getting Killed starts with a colossal misdirect. ‘Trinidad’, for all its strangeness and explosiveness, deftly sets out the band’s MO for the record. It lets us know that Winter’s irreverence and deathly-serious-but-not pen is still lying around, and introduces the project’s rhythmic experimentation in a loop of dread and unease that’s either in 13/4 or groups of 4/4, 4/4, and 5/4 depending on how the nerds are counting it. The weakest of the three singles, as an album opener ‘Trinidad’ finally feels in place.

Track two, ‘Cobra’, is most likely going to be the runaway song as far as streaming numbers are concerned. Emily Green’s lilting and hypnotic guitar – a prominent feature on the next track ‘Husbands’ too – is accompanied by a swirling arrangement which makes you want to listen to the song in mono. It is also, for what it’s worth, another addition to the canon of Winter’s thing for imagery centred on feet, which peppered Heavy Metal, and would be weirder if the songwriter didn’t draw so heavily from Christian symbolism and iconography. Cameron, all I’m saying is that at a certain point you can’t hide behind John 13:1-17 anymore.  

Despite its smaller profile on ‘Cobra’, the hero of this record is Geese’s rhythm section. Max Bassin’s drums and Dominic DiGesu’s bass are so squarely in the pocket you’ll forget they’re different instruments until Bassin blasts you with microsecond perfect fills, or DiGesu walks to the other end of the fretboard in a way that makes you do a triple-take. The title track and ‘Bow Down’ borrow heavily from Latin rhythms in a way that’s unexpected but sounds inevitable, as if the only way the sprawling freak outs and accented stabs of the guitars and pianos that sit atop the low end can be excused is because of how propulsive and sexy the beats that drive them are.

‘Islands of Men’ is a guttural song, and should be considered among the best on the album. Not because it translates from somewhere bilious and dark, but because it’s a song you once heard when you were waking up and then promptly forgot as you went about it. You heard it step by step the only time you decided to go for a hike on your own. Green’s inching guitarwork is joined by myriad percussion to create a propulsive, urgent psalm of truth. When will you, young man, stop running away? In six or so minutes, Geese needle at the confected masculinity crisis and put their post-irony to the side to be direct, and by doing so start to lay out the record’s rationale.

“I’m getting killed, by a pretty good life”

Until recently I was of the firm opinion that these are times to be experienced through collage, performance, and multimedia, that traditional forms would fail to catch up and capture the fraughtness of getting killed by a pretty good life. This isn’t to say that Geese have distilled all the contemporary horrors, happinesses, and most importantly confusions into this one project, but no other work has come this close. It doesn’t fucking stop, and neither does this Geese record. Somewhere in between its rhythmic density, Ukrainian choirs, and JPEGMAFIA ad libs, Bassin, Green, DiGesu, and Winter have nestled a project which is compassionate toward how hard pretty good lives can suck, and is knowing of how trite it is to complain about them. 

Kenny Blume is someone types such as myself have a lot to thank for. The former Kenny Beats has shepherded a generation of one time Brockhampton enthusiasts out of their bedrooms and into the real world through collaborations with alt rappers (incl. JPEGMAFIA), comedians, and self-involved UK punk bands. Kenny’s presence at the helm of Getting Killed can be read as an unlikely pairing. Geese have previously collaborated with James Ford, a seeming right of passage for indie darlings via his work with Fontaines D.C., Arctic Monkeys (the good ones and ‘Tranquility Base…’), and BC,NR, but Kenny has found a magic so potent here that the follow-up has reportedly already been laid down. By virtue of its sheer busyness, this record could have sounded completely blown out and unpalatable, but Blume has corralled an album that makes you look in the mirror, pinch yourself, or spin a top just to check if it is indeed real.

The finale, ‘Long Island City Here I Come’, is the sonic equivalent of Geese careening through each of the 14 lanes on the northern New Jersey Turnpike without so much as a thought toward their indicator. It is a helter-skelter charge toward quite possibly nothing, filled with madcap admonishments of Joan of Arc for being a bad communicator and focusing too much on the Lord, tongue-in-cheek interpolations of folk standard ‘Dink’s Song’, frantic drums that suggest Bassin has chosen the red guy on the Omnitrix, CBGB-era post-punk guitar embellishments, and the best statement bass line of the year.

Whether Geese will survive the hype cycle is now the biggest question in indie-rock. ‘Long Island City Here I Come’ gives us an insight to how the band will approach artistic life with the weight of the ocean perched squarely and uniquely on top of them. Urgently, Winter in his singular, combustible, shout-drawl not-baritone leaves us with this: 

“I HAVE NO IDEA WHERE I’M GOING, HERE I COME!”

96

Ollie O’Brien

23 October 2025