Halfway through “2122,” Cameron Winter held his phone to his guitar pickups and a few seconds of a song crackled through: Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” – AKA, the Dodger song.

Ten minutes before Geese took the stage on Thursday, the team had been knocked out of World Series contention. Coming from a band of Met-loving New Yorkers, it was salt in the wound.

Whatever beef New York and LA are supposed to have did not survive three sold-out nights at Hollywood Forever. The shows, running October 15 through 17, are their first Los Angeles shows since their performance at an Artists for Aid benefit, and it felt like the whole town showed up for it.

'Getting Killed' by Geese — Getting Killed – Geese

It’s been a very good year for the young band, with some of their momentum starting with Winter alone. His December 2024 solo album, Heavy Metal, pulled in a much wider audience than anticipated, and plenty of those listeners followed him back to Geese for Getting Killed, which The New Yorker, NME, and Stereogum each named best album.

This month alone, the band played their biggest hometown shows yet at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, and “Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s film of the solo show that made Winter, at 23, one of the youngest artists ever to headline the hall, premiered at the New York Film Festival. It hits L.A. theaters next month. This tour is kind of their victory lap.

Geese: ‘Getting Killed’ Never Sounded So Good

:: REVIEW ::

At Hollywood Forever, an artist plays to both the living and the dead.

Some of these dead are kindred spirits. Johnny Ramone kneels in bronze near the cemetery’s pond, mid-strum, and Dee Dee Ramone is buried there too. The Ramones came out of the same aforementioned Forest Hills, Queens. Fifty years after the Ramones’ debut album, another band of New York kids with loud guitars was playing for them, the span of a continent away from home.

People spread picnic blankets around and lounged against headstones. The stage was nearly bare: a riser for drummer Max Bassin, smoke billowing from the back to soak in the colored stage lights, and plenty of open floor for Winter, who paces around for much of the set.

Geese's Getting Killed Again tour poster — Geese’s Getting Killed Again tour poster

Each musician in Geese is at the top of their game.

Though the studio recordings of their hits are peak, there is a magic in watching them work together beautifully in sync on the stage. Guitarist Emily Green freaking shreds. Her guitar is chewy and heavy on “Trinidad,” glassy and saccharine on “Au Pays du Cocaine.” In her control, it swoops and yowls like an animal. Among her peers in the rock scene, she is a definite high-water mark.

On the drums, Max Bassin churns out chest-caving thwomps on “Husbands”; on their heavier songs, his drums are a sledgehammer to stone in the best way possible. And then during “Half Real,” his cymbals shimmer sometimes, while on “Islands of Men,” he trades the kit for a woodblock. Under all of it, Dominic DiGesu keeps an impressive pace; his bass glues their sound together, giving it a delicious roundness. Winter’s voice is the cherry on top: Pleasantly unctuous, if a touch ill at ease with itself.

The group saved “Trinidad” for last, as they have tended to do lately, stretching it from under four minutes on the record to more than ten.

They left long gaps between verses, pasting in heavyhearted riff loops between lines. The extra runtime gives Winter room for a running bit about his imaginary husband, who commits a new and creatively heinous offense most nights. On Thursday, the husband lost his nest egg on DraftKings and wipes his ass with his hand. On Friday (which I caught too) he bought a failing Carl’s Jr. franchise outside the Burbank airport.

The song riffs stretch into long, droning swells, and when Winter finally shrieks the delightfully, cathartically absurd line about the bomb in his car, the pit erupts, and people shove, jostle,and launch each other wholesale into the air.