Getting Killed by Geese doesn’t really begin: you just find yourself inside it, like walking into a room where the conversation is already heated, voices overlapping, and nobody bothers to explain what you’ve missed. It’s an album that offers no introductions, leaving you with a choice: stand on the sidelines or dive headfirst into the fray.
Geese were born in Brooklyn as little more than teenagers, and like many New York kids they could have lived under the shadow of their influences. Projector (2021) showed them grappling with the post-punk playbook, somewhere between Television and Interpol; 3D Country (2023) hurled them into a brasher, dust-covered territory, like the Rolling Stones in the desert; while Cameron Winter’s solo debut, Heavy Metal (2024), revealed a more intimate side, halfway between Thom Yorke and a young Nick Cave. With Getting Killed, produced by Kenneth Blume (aka Kenny Beats), the band brings this trajectory to a close: no longer epigones, no longer students, but a group bold enough to write its own grammar.
The opening of Trinidad is a manifesto: funk grooves veering off course, sudden blasts of horns, voices shouted like sermons in an improvised church. The same controlled schizophrenia runs throughout the album. Cobra softens the mood with a soulful delicacy that recalls the Beach Boys filtered through the Velvet Underground; 100 Horses channels Captain Beefheart in its organized collapse, while Husbands and Bow Down echo the rhythmic obsessions of the Talking Heads, only sharper, less polished. The finale, Long Island City Here I Come, evokes the Rolling Stones of Sticky Fingers, stripped of any glamour: here it’s just the city, raw, leaving you short of breath.
Lyrically, Winter favors suggestion over storytelling. He repeats phrases like mantras, building images that oscillate between the absurd and the prophetic. In Taxes he spits out a blasphemous challenge — “If you want me to pay my taxes / You’d better come over with a crucifix” — sounding both furious and ironic. It’s his way of narrating the anxiety of living in a world overloaded with stimuli and contradictions, a bit like Radiohead on Kid A, but without the electronic filters to cushion the voice.
Kenny Beats’ production is central: he brings with him the logic of sampling and collage, borrowed from hip hop, and applies it to rock. The result is an album that breathes like a mixtape: fragments chasing each other, grooves repeating to the point of obsession, sudden ruptures that look like mistakes but reveal a precise guiding hand. It’s an approach that nods to the motorik drive of krautrock, fused with the theatricality of Roxy Music.
It’s not a flawless record. Some tracks feel like sketches left unfinished, others stretch out a little too loosely. But the strength of Geese lies in their willingness to take risks: to choose energy over calculation, vertigo over craft. In this sense, Getting Killed captures a moment of real maturity: Geese are no longer trying to prove they can play, but to show who they are.
Getting Killed isn’t their definitive masterpiece, but it stands as a sharp snapshot of a band in motion, restless and unafraid of contradiction, uneven in places, but charged with urgency and full of life.