Getting Killed by Geese ( 4.5 / 5 )

Must Hear Tracks: “Long Island City Here I Come” “Au Pays Du Cocaine” “Taxes” “Getting Killed”

God invented the rock band to do two things: lay down tasty riffs, and say cryptic shit. The legends of rock history understood this calling. The Zeppelins, Beatles, Stones, Velvets, T Rexes, all the way down the line to Radiohead and even the cardigan-clad Vampire Weekend. They’re all points along the same thread of freewheeling, occasionally neurotic, coolness. Masters of balance, they made the heavy feel weightless. Straining drum heads, nickel wounds, and vocal chords to reach escape velocity.

(Think the “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Helter Skelter,” “Ramble On,” “15 Step,” “A-Punk.” All a bit raucous at times; banging away, but light as air, as if on tiptoes. Even “If You Want Me To Stay” by Sly Stone skips across the roof of your consciousness like a ballet dancer.)

This is the essence of rock. Geese understand this. Earnest students of rock’s annals, they’ve strained and shredded their way into the upper atmosphere. Cameron Winter, Emily Green, Dominic DiGesu, and Max Bassin, the 4 young New Yorkers who make up this promising band, got together in the lab like a group of NASA physicists and concocted their own recipe for weightlessness. With Getting Killed, their 3rd and strongest LP, Geese prove just how alive (and light) rock music is in 2025.

While all the legends of olde had a signature sound, Geese seem to take all that came before them in moderation. They’re a chameleonic outfit dabbling in whatever sound fits. Smoky 13/8 blues is shattered by overblown noise and shrieks of “THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR!” in “Trinidad.” “100 Horses” sports a stomping Zeppelin-nodding bass line. “Cobra” pairs bright tumbling guitar arpeggios a la Keith Richards with Jaggerian romantic musings in a gorgeous homage to the Rolling Stones. But the tune that really puts the rock pantheon into the blender is the title track. “Getting Killed” starts on a full sprint with “Tomorrow Never Knows” psychedelia floating over the top of a hard rocking rhythm section. Then they drop the bottom out for the verses, with clean, Jonny Greenwood guitar tones taking over. All the while, Cameron Winter’s elastic voice bends and stretches into the perfect timbre for each tonal shift. Invoking Lennon first, then Yorke, with Serj Tankian’s nasally high-baritone sprinkled over everything. When they finally settle into an afro-beat-meets-Radiohead breakdown, Winter goes all in on his Thom Yorke impression and wails “I’m getting killed by a pretty good life,” his voice breaking and cracking as he chokes out the line. It’s one of the most arresting moments on the album, and proof that despite their retrophilic sonic identity, Geese’s message is very much rooted in the here and now.

Like a good scavenger hunt, Getting Killed reveals its message piece by piece. The enigmatic lines trade off with startling moments of clarity (a classic Cameron Winter songwriting tactic, for those who binged his solo record Heavy Metal). For every “I was a sailor, now I’m a boat” there’s a “My love takes a long time, longer than a lover can survive.” For every “Yeah,I’m a TV on the road” there’s a “I’ve got half a mind, to just pay for the lobotomy, and tell ’em ‘get rid of the bad times and get rid of the good times too‘.” Little gold nuggets of downtrodden optimism and weary honesty, scattered in the rock. In less capable hands, this could get annoying. With Geese, though, these nuggets show up often enough that you can count on them. And they add up, eventually, to a fortune.

That fortune, when taken wholesale, is a snapshot of Gen-Z at large. Priorities of the first digital natives falling into place. There’s the lack of faith in a higher power (despite many religious allusions), tempered with a radical acceptance that they must be their own salvation. That one’s best captured by “Au Pays du Cocaine,” with its cathartic singalongs: “you can be free, and still come home,” “you can change, and still choose me.” Or the idea that they’ve paid enough dues, and if you want to squeeze any more out of them, “you’re gonna have to nail [them] down” to a crucifix, as declared in “Taxes.” And the urging, above all else, to “stop running away from what is real, and what is fake.” Wise up to the scams, weed out deception — self deception included. That mantra, although isolated to “Islands of Men,” serves as a thematic touchstone for the whole record: trust yourself, and pursue the truth relentlessly.

These zeitgeist nuggets keep accumulating throughout Getting Killed. By the end, we’re primed for something big. In the midst of subconscious anticipation, closing track “Long Island City Here I Come” hits like a ton of bricks. It’s a proper grand finale, packing everything Geese do well into a sprawling, 6.5 minute opus. Simultaneously oracular and resolute, it lays down tasty riffs and enough symbolic historical references to make your head spin. I’m not sure whether to listen with Wikipedia and a notepad or a bottle of whiskey. And that’s precisely the beauty of it. Drums skitter and pianos hammer away as Joan of Arc warns: “the lord has a lot of friends, and in the end, he’ll probably forget he met you before.” Later, we meet the man who “sat behind a desk a million feet wide,” who finally “laid down his hammer” and died, presumably clearing the way for the next generation. Finally, there’s Charlemagne in Vietnam, who laments “until I get home, I am not anyone.” The monarch “on the midnight bus,” faceless and nameless in transit. This cosmic mishmash of pop history feels oddly like scrolling TikTok in a drunken stupor. Sucking it all in like a sponge: the silly, the ugly, the brilliant. Getting wiser, and dumber, and bolder all at once. The characters and proverbs stack up, one on top of another until cryptic and profound fuse in the white-hot reactor core of rock ‘n’ roll. Exit velocity: achieved.

As these Geese leave the atmosphere at mach-fuck, they leave us with this parting message: “I have no idea where I’m going. Here I come.“