Cameron Winter sounds like he’s been gargling gravel and existential dread in equal measure. Two minutes into “Trinidad,” the opening track of Geese‘s third album, Getting Killed, his voice cracks into a desperate wail: “There’s a bomb in my car!” You realize this isn’t the same band that made those early post-punk sketches. The Brooklyn quintet has discovered what happens when you stop apologizing for being strange and start weaponizing it instead.
Everything feels different now. Where 2023’s 3D Country played like talented kids rifling through their parents’ record collection, Getting Killed sounds like those same kids have grown up, moved out, and started having nightmares about the world they’ve inherited. Winter’s voice, that remarkable instrument that made his solo album Heavy Metal such a revelation, now carries the weight of someone who’s seen too much late-night cable news and too many rent increases. His delivery bounces between whispered confessions and full-throated sermons, sometimes within the same breath.
Working with producer Kenneth Blume (the artist known as Kenny Beats), the band recorded these eleven tracks during January’s Los Angeles wildfires, and that sense of imminent catastrophe seeps into everything. The music itself feels combustible, built from extended jams that were later sculpted into songs. You can hear the process in how tracks breathe and evolve, growing from minimal grooves into towering walls of sound before collapsing back into themselves.
Take the title track. What starts as a bluesy guitar riff layered with fragments of Ukrainian choral music gradually accumulates layers: drums that shuffle rather than pound, bass lines that curve around empty space, Winter’s voice floating above it all like smoke from a distant fire. There’s something almost liturgical about the arrangement, as if the band is conducting some kind of secular mass for the end times.
Max Bassin’s drumming becomes the gravitational centre that keeps these songs from floating away entirely. On “Husbands” and “Bow Down,” his rhythmic patterns create the foundation for some of Winter’s most commanding vocal performances, the kind that make you lean closer to the speakers to catch every muttered aside and strangled cry.
Emily Green treats her guitar like a painter might approach a canvas, adding texture and colour in unexpected places. The interplay between her lines and Dominic DiGesu’s bass creates a rhythmic conversation that feels organic rather than constructed, as if the songs are discovering themselves in real time. Rather than relying on conventional riff-based structures, she builds atmospheres that shift and breathe.
Lyrically, Winter continues to work in fragments and impressions rather than linear narratives. “I was a sailor, I was a sailor and now I’m a boat,” he intones on “Bow Down,” the kind of line that could sound pretentious in less capable hands but here feels like genuine mysticism. His wordplay often borders on the absurd (“You may say that our love was only half real / But that’s only half true”), but there’s something deeply human in the way he uses humour to process genuine pain.
The album’s political undertones surface most clearly on “Taxes,” where Winter’s narrator declares, “If you want me to pay my taxes / You better come over with a crucifix / You’re gonna have to nail me down.” It’s the kind of defiant statement that could come across as juvenile posturing, but delivered in Winter’s wounded croak, it sounds like the last words of someone who’s been pushed too far.
Geese have always been skilled at subverting expectations, but Getting Killed represents their most successful balancing act yet. Songs like “Half Real” and “Au Pays du Cocaine” showcase their gentler instincts, while tracks like “100 Horses” and “Long Island City Here I Come” provide the cathartic release their more adventurous arrangements seem to promise. The band never settles into a single mood long enough for it to become predictable.
Winter’s solo work casts a long shadow over this record. Where 3D Country often felt like the band straining against their own ambitions, Getting Killed finds them comfortable in their expanded sonic palette. The arrangements give Winter’s vocals room to breathe, but they’re also dense enough to reward repeated listening. This is music that reveals new details with each encounter, the kind of record that demands to be lived with rather than simply heard.
There’s something beautifully reckless about the whole enterprise. While so many bands seem paralyzed by the weight of their own self-consciousness, Geese sound liberated by their willingness to fail spectacularly. They throw everything at these songs (trombone, guest screams from JPEGMAFIA, that Ukrainian choir sample) and somehow it all coheres into something that feels inevitable rather than calculated.
Getting Killed arrives at a moment when Geese’s profile has never been higher, thanks largely to the unexpected success of Winter’s solo album. The pressure to capitalize on that momentum with something more accessible might have tempted a less adventurous band. Instead, they’ve doubled down on their most experimental instincts, creating their most challenging and rewarding work to date.
By the time Winter reaches the climactic “Long Island City Here I Come,” admitting “I have no idea where I’m going,” the sentiment feels less like confusion than liberation. Getting Killed is the sound of a band that has stopped trying to be anything other than exactly what they are, and the result is their most essential statement yet. At a time when everything feels increasingly unstable, Geese have created music that matches the moment: beautiful, terrifying, and absolutely necessary.
Getting Killed is out now.
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