Review
This band sounds as if it could fall apart, and that is the point.
Getting Killed, the fourth album by the Brooklyn band Geese, is an unstable, thrilling rock record that holds together on nerve.
Written by CONTROL
This article runs 394 words and takes about two minutes to read.
Geese recorded Getting Killed in about ten days in Los Angeles in January 2025, working with the producer Kenny Beats while wildfires burned across the county. It would be too neat to say you can hear the smoke, but you can certainly hear the hurry. The band, a quartet since the guitarist Foster Hudson left in 2023, arrived with roughly twenty unfinished demos and shaped them in the room, and the album keeps the marks of that pressure on its surface.
The attention arrived first from elsewhere. Cameron Winter’s solo album Heavy Metal, released in December 2024, turned the band’s singer into a critics’ favorite, and Getting Killed is partly the sound of a band catching up to its frontman and then refusing to become his backing group. Emily Green’s guitar, Dominic DiGesu’s bass and Max Bassin’s drums do not accompany Winter so much as argue with him.
Noise with a pulse
The opener, “Trinidad,” sets out the method. A groove locks in, Winter bellows over it, and the song threatens to collapse without ever quite doing so. “Cobra” is looser and sweeter, a lopsided pop song with a swagger borrowed from older rock records. Elsewhere the band stretches out, with trombone, violin and a contribution from the rapper JPEGMafia smearing the edges, and the closing “Long Island City Here I Come” runs past six minutes without feeling long.
Winter’s voice is the album’s great risk. He sings like a lounge crooner in the middle of a panic attack, swooping and cracking and overselling on purpose, and on some tracks the performance becomes the whole idea. The back half, from “Half Real” to “Taxes,” is strong but less surprising than the front, and a listener who does not warm to that voice will not be won over by the arrangements alone.
What makes the record matter is its refusal to settle. Rock bands of this generation too often choose between the museum and the mood board, either restoring an old sound or arranging its surfaces. Geese sound like people discovering what they can do while they are doing it, which is the oldest promise of the form and the hardest one to keep.
The verdict: Getting Killed is messy and abrasive, and it is fully alive in a way few guitar records manage. Give it three listens before you decide about the singer.