I. “I DON’T DESERVE THIS/NOBODY DESERVES THIS”
Music critics like to do this thing where they point to an album or a song and declare, “This music captures how it feels to live in America right now.” And, often, I make fun of this. And you probably do, too. It just sounds so foolish and pompous. Because it’s almost never literally true. Art that aspires to capture “how it feels to live in America right now,” 99 percent of the time, is terrible. If it happens, it’s only by accident, which paradoxically undermines the allegedly “definitive” nature of the enterprise. Either way, most arguments about a particular piece of music capturing the national mood are rooted in faulty premises. Worse, it’s pretentious “music critic stuff,” ripe for derision.
Having said that: I have a song that captures what it feels like to live in America right now.
It’s called “Trinidad,” and it’s the first track on the new Geese album, Getting Killed. You might already know it — Getting Killed is among the year’s most anticipated indie-rock records, and “Trinidad” was the second single, released about two months before the arrival of the LP this week. Though it’s hardly an obvious choice for a single. It is, rather, a confounding sonic blob, a bad acid trip that sounds like a late-’90s Phish improv plucked from the middle of “You Enjoy Myself.” In the chorus — if it can be called a chorus — singer Cameron Winter screams, “There’s a bomb in my car!” And the music makes you believe him. The swirl of sounds, the bleeps and bloops and thunder and crashes, replicate the slow-motion sensation of spinning out in a cataclysmic car wreck. That feeling where your body hasn’t quite yet been annihilated but is keenly aware that total devastation is coming. A familiar premonition these days, to be sure.
“My son is in bed / my daughters are dead,” Winter intones. “My wife’s in the shed / My husband’s burning lead.” The details are so extreme and terrifying that it morphs into comedy as dark as a shark’s eyes. This can’t possibly be happening, you think when “Trinidad” is on. Though you were already thinking that, because — here it comes — that’s what it feels like to live in America right now. “Trinidad,” like our unreal reality, is ridiculous and horrific, numbly stoned and violently kneejerk, and on the verge of certain collapse even as it spins destructively forward.
After listening to Getting Killed for the past few months, I have no doubt that it is the greatest album of 2025. But I am even more confident that is the most 2025 album of 2025, the record that, by far, best captures how scary and chaotic things seem right now, in this age of smart robots and dumb authoritarians and passionately litigated talk-show controversies and memory-holed sex-trafficking conspiracies. Getting Killed nailed that “tragicomic horror show” vibe from the moment the video for “Taxes” dropped, when Geese depicted themselves playing for an audience of unhinged freaks who rip each other apart as the music hits an exhilarating peak.
That was back in July. At the start of fall, we are currently in full-on self-immolation mode. Threats, invective, limbs, bullets — they’re all choking the air like vultures. And now, finally, the appropriate soundtrack for the madness has arrived.
II. “ALL PEOPLE IN TIMES OF WAR MUST GO DOWN TO THE CIRCUS”
Getting Killed was made in Los Angeles at the start of the year. Outside, various American plagues lurked. They city was burning down. The former president was about to inaugurated as the new president. But from a career perspective, Geese were no longer, it seemed, a second or third-tier indie outfit, due to the growing buzz for Winter’s recent solo album Heavy Metal.
Geese’s previous two albums hadn’t exactly (pardon the expression) set the world on fire. The first of these, 2021’s Projector, had garnered some initial hype, though personally I couldn’t hear much to be excited about. In retrospect, my personal biases worked against Geese. They had been pegged by supporters as the latest “cool NYC indie-rock band,” an archetype that has long triggered my skepticism (even though I like a lot of bands in that lineage). Also, I had already pledged my critical support to a different band of waterfowl, the jam-band Goose, who I cast in my mind as the upstart to Geese’s Big NYC rock homefield media advantage.
Silly, I know. But I nevertheless found Projector to be a rather run-of-the-mill indie-rock record. And it turned out that Winter himself ultimately agreed. As he recently told Rolling Stone, “We just did a fucking facsimile of a copy of a goddamn rip-off.”
What I didn’t know at the time was that Projector wasn’t actually their first album. Their actual first album came out in 2018, when the band members were still in high school. It’s called A Beautiful Memory, and it’s since been scrubbed from streaming platforms (though you can still find it on YouTube). I get why these guys wanted to bury music they made when they were 15 or 16, but A Beautiful Memory is actually… pretty great? At the risk of perpetrating gross hyperbole, I think it might be the most accomplished music made by high-school sophomores since Alex Chilton sang “The Letter” nearly 50 years ago.
It’s also, admittedly, a blatantly derivative classic-rock pastiche, with nods to the all the typical blacklight poster favorites: Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Doors, The Rolling Stones. For an outfit obsessed with being a true original — a potentially Quixotian pursuit for a rock band in 2025 — I can see it being an embarrassment, no matter how expert the execution. (Honestly, it’s the album that Greta Van Fleet will spend the next 30 years trying and failing to make.) But A Beautiful Memory does add some important context to the arrival of Getting Killed, which marks the point where Geese’s teenaged classic-rock scholarship comes full circle.
You can hear traces of Physical Graffiti and Sticky Fingers in the remarkably limber title track, where a bluesy riff bangs against the chants of a sampled Ukrainian choir and a hopped-up, arena-rock backbeat. The bombast also echoes through the rubbery funk of “100 Horses” and the delectably manic “Bow Down,” which spotlight the fluid and frenetic drumming of Max Bassin, the band’s secret weapon. On these tracks and elsewhere, Geese applies a funhouse mirror to guitar-based traditions and transforms them into exciting and exotic new shapes. Despite still being a very young band — they’re all still in their early 20s — they have fully internalized the rock syllabus and therefore can now move beyond it. Their talent is immense. It’s thrilling, honestly, to ponder how far they’ve already come, and imagine where they might go.
III. “AND TELL ‘EM GET RID OF THE BAD TIMES / AND GET RID OF THE GOOD TIMES, TOO”
A Beautiful Memory peaks with the penultimate track, a Gen Z spin on The Doors’ “The End” called “I Will Never Die.” Over several alternately suffocating and riveting minutes, Winter relates a story about a miserable old man tormented every day by “the same three little shits” who come to his house and beat him mercilessly. Finally, the man decides to shoot one of the kids and then himself, an early portent of the apocalyptic vibes emanating from their latest record (and, you know, everywhere else).
If I had heard A Beautiful Memory back then, I would have been an instant fan. As it is, I didn’t come on board with Geese until 2023’s 3D Country, which stands as the most purely fun rock record of the decade thus far. As of now, I think, I still prefer it slightly over Getting Killed, just for the sheer exuberance on display, even though the new album is a deeper and more emotional work. (3D Country is Boogie Nights, and Getting Killed is Magnolia.) In terms of laugh-out-loud unpredictability, nothing on Getting Killed can quite top 3D Country‘s third number, “Cowboy Nudes,” when the song explodes at the 1:10-mark into a delirious percussion breakdown, like something Roy Thomas Baker would have dreamt up had the produced Santana in the mid-’70s.
The most decisive artistic development on 3D Country was Winter’s ascent to “generational talent” status as a rock singer. Admittedly, this is a low bar, especially for male vocalists, who in the modern era usually sing like they’re trying extra hard to not be singled out for criticism or mockery. Winter, meanwhile, constantly risks failure as a singer. And, depending on your point of view, he succumbs to it. I am sure that anyone who reads this and ends up hating Getting Killed will do so because they can’t stand his voice. But for me, Winter’s fearless phrasing and operatic emoting (coupled with his natural charisma) makes him the first truly great rock frontman in I don’t know how long.
On Getting Killed, he constantly puts himself on the tightrope, caterwauling like a man trying to simultaneously channel Leonard Cohen, Nina Simone, Captain Beefheart, and Julian Casablancas. And he actually pulls it off on “Half Real,” one of two songs (along with the hilariously titled “Au Pays du Cocaine”) that can be loosely classified as ballads. As was the case on the funereal-paced Heavy Metal, Winter starts “Half Real” in a pained warble that conveys a feeling pitched somewhere between a spiritual crisis and an epiphany, before gradually lifting his voice to an ecstatic purr that sounds like a woolly mammoth having a tantric orgasm (complimentary).
Again: I don’t expect everyone to appreciate the sound of a woolly mammoth have a tantric orgasm. But you must admit it’s not something you’ve heard before. And when did you last think that about a young, hotshot indie-rock band?
IV. “YOU WERE THERE THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED / AND I’LL BE THERE THE DAY IT DIES AGAIN”
I want to reiterate the last word of the previous sentence: band. Geese is a band. Along with Winter and Bassin, guitarist Emily Green and bassist Dominic DiGesu are critical components of the overall whole, their instruments melting into one another even as the music zigs and zags at unexpected pivot points. The pleasure of listening to Getting Killed derives from the harmonious tension of their ensemble playing, whether it’s centered on the lethargic groove of “Husbands,” the slippery dynamics of “Islands Of Men,” or the beatific jangle of “Cobra.”
And then there’s the closing number, the “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” of Getting Killed. On “Long Island City Here I Come,” Winter rides a barreling wave of barely contained noise, with Bassin, Green, and DiGesu plugging away furiously as the singer searches for a way out of our modern-day hyperreal nightmare. The quest proves inconclusive. What he finds instead is a religious vision: “And Joan of Arc she warned / ‘The lord has a lot of friends, and in the end / He’ll probably forget he’s ever met you before.’”
The band part bears emphasizing, as Geese is still best known for the (brilliant) solo record put out at the end of 2024 by their lead singer. Heavy Metal, indeed, is a mesmerizing listen, and the confidence gained from that “difficult” album’s rapturous reception has clearly carried over to the fearlessness of Getting Killed. But I also think Cameron Winter broke out ahead of Geese because, as a music culture generally, we are no longer geared toward glorifying groups. And I don’t just mean rock groups. Think back to the 1990s and recall how groups once also dominated pop, R&B, hip-hop, and country. Groups still exist, obviously, but they don’t capture the zeitgeist anymore. And that’s our fault as much as theirs. As we, the listeners, have retreated from communal spaces to tech-aided isolation, so have our musicians. Solo artists are simply more “relatable” now, as conduits that reflect our own limited IRL social circles and suspicion of outsiders. After all, how many of us ever stand in a pack of three or four people out in public anymore?
Geese, therefore, is the rarest of beasts: A great, young American band. Not a side project for yet another popular singer-songwriter with undeniable parasocial appeal, but a working unit where the members become something greater than their individual selves. Maybe it’s still possible to have faith something bigger, whether it’s a group of musicians or a nation, after all.
Getting Killed is out 9/26 via Partisan Records. Find more information here.
