Geese’s fourth studio album ‘Getting Killed’ is unruly and intelligent, and cements the band’s claim as one of the greatest rock acts of their generation.

Stream: ‘Getting Killed’ – Geese

<span data-mce-type="bookmark" style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span><a href="https://geesebandnyc.bandcamp.com/album/getting-killed">Getting Killed by Geese</a>

If you’ve been around anyone somewhere between middle school and college age recently, you may have noticed a strange linguistic anomaly: Young people have internalized the short-form video platform algorithms that allegedly punish the use of off-limits words.

The result is a sad, neutered lexicon where “corn” substitutes “porn,” “seggs” replaces “sex,” and perhaps most inescapably, “unalive” is used to mean “kill” or “die.” It’s weird and annoying, a dispiriting development in computer’s colonization of the human psyche.

'Getting Killed' by Geese — ‘Getting Killed’ by Geese

I guess Geese didn’t get the memo. The Brooklynite indie darlings – Cameron Winter, Emily Green, Max Bassin, and Dominic DeGesu – didn’t just use the word “kill” on their fourth studio album, Getting Killed: They made it the title. I don’t know if it’s their intention, but the effect is kind of a perfect encapsulation of their whole ethos: they’re too devoted to the art to waste time on self-censorship. The new record spins like a stylish one-finger-salute to puritanism and palatability, a reminder that blood and sex still belong in the public imagination.

Out now via Partisan Records, Getting Killed arrives as the follow-up to Geese’s 2023 sophomore album, 3D Country. That record was an exhilarating and chaotic, proggy art-rock odyssey, and their newest release finds the band making a slightly different kind of calculation. It’s a little more radio-friendly and, with the exception of tracks like “Trinidad” and “100 Horses,” consistently bends towards a more traditional melody and softer sonic tone.

It’s natural that this album is a touch more accessible: After the massive critical success of frontman Cameron Winter’s solo debut, Heavy Metal, last December, Geese have more eyes and ears on them than ever before. While some of the raw post-punkiness of their last release has been traded in for control, the choice allows for a delicious tension between bright sound and shadowy ideas.

Sonically, there’s a lot to get excited about on Getting Killed. It’s a sort-of-through-composed album, with production helmed by Kenneth Blume (previously, as you probably know him, Kenny Beats), whose touch carves out space between the layers of instrumentation and vocals. The effect is far from the boring wall-of-sound-esque production that plagues much of the indie-rock establishment today. “Trinidad” is a crashing, clanking, beautiful mess of a song. “Husbands” starts slow and suspicious, and builds up into a full, lush catharsis of claps and syncopation.

My favorite track of the album, “Half Real,” opens with a sitar-like droning melody that sounds like the opening of a Satyajit Ray film, and unfurls into a sardonic love song. And in the last 20 seconds of the closer “Long Island City Here I Come,” drummer Max Bassin gives a performance so energetic it could probably keep the lights going in an office building for a week.

The lyrics, too, push against top 40 convention, an oblique worldview a la Cohen or Waits. Abstractions like “I’ve met angels so deep undercover that they’d sit on Solomon’s throne” or “all people must dance in times of war” build up a literary world of soldiers, sailors, snakes, danger, bells, and gumball machines.

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
I’ve got no more thinking to do”

– “Half Real,” Geese

But Winter’s vocal performance is the anchor and tornado at the center of the album. He swings between a teenager-on-klonopin baritone and weapons-grade howling. His range is vast and unpredictable, and wails in a way that makes me want to turn my head towards the sky and close my eyes.

At other moments, his voice becomes a nasally sneer. He levitates, moans, picks odd phrases to linger on. He’s a true showman, leaning hard into affectation and letting sweaty desperation bleed into his performance, a move perfected decades back by the likes of Robert Smith and Plant.

**On Getting Killed, Geese’s influences are pretty clear. The quartet seem to be scholars of the entire musical canon more or less, and, thank god, steer clear of the trap of imitation.**

No pastiche period costumes here. While the album may not always aim for the chaotic heights of its predecessor, it does confirm an extraordinary ability of the band to chew up their new wave, post-punk, prog, indie influences and spit it all out remade in their own image.

The result is easily the most compelling album of the year.

P. S. — A couple days after I started writing this, I saw that a billboard for the album went up near my house. Notably, the word “KILLED” has been covered up with a heavy black redaction box (see below). I’m not sure if it went up that way, or if this is the handiwork of street artists, but it did confirm for me that the world is indeed still not ready to ‘Get Killed.’

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