Review Summary: There is only dance music in times of war
Every so often, an album comes along that shifts the foundation of indie-rock. From Radiohead’s
OK Computer to Neutral Milk Hotel’s
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea to Arcade Fire’s
Funeral, there’s a rich history of cornerstone records that have inspired entire generations of artists to lift up their voices and guitars in the spirit of true creation. It's been a while since I've felt a similar stirring to what those records were able to deliver around the turn of the millennium, and since then we’ve witnessed dozens of “next great band” anointments (some by me!) that have proven both premature and transient. While that sort of projective praise is both tried and stale here in 2025, it finally seems befitting with Geese - a band still young by all means but whose music feels like it’s already been to hell and back. They are an angry but humorous bunch; passionate yet undeniably exhausted. Their third LP,
Getting Killed, reflects the absurdity of modern times - delivering mock-biblical apocalypses where angels don’t just blow trumpets, they espouse gun violence. Where folks vouch for crucifixion just to escape an endless cycle of work, taxation, and depressing world news. Where Cameron Winter cites Joshua’s conquering of Jericho while kicking a man’s ass in the street. Where the band plays their cowbell with a pistol.
Getting Killed is a strange experience in that it
sounds like it should be satire, but
feels like a sign of the times.
“THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR”, shrieks Winter on album opener ‘Trinidad’, and it’s a proper introduction to the sheer mayhem that
Getting Killed brings to its audience. Hushed verses of “I tried, I tried, I tried so hard” precede the explosive refrain, framing the song as a microcosm of how we’re living post-pandemic - striving, struggling, and always a split second away from the next disaster. ‘100 Horses’ paints a picture of a young soldier mired in violence (“General Adams told me / Son, you were born to die scared”), while musing that “There is only dance music in times of war.” A piano medley cuts the tension like water gushing through a busted levee, and as the intensity resolves, Winter sings, “We have danced for far too long” - a sly nod to how war has pervaded all of our lives for generations. So much of
Getting Killed is built on the premise of taking small, seemingly simple observations of the troubled world around us and presenting them with the utmost subtlety. It’s often veiled by jest, but in a way so brash and ridiculous that only Geese could have pulled it off. And while the atmosphere here is indeed chaotic - the vocals are messy, the instrumentation is strange, the lyrics venture to some pretty far-out places -
Getting Killed somehow still manages to be a fundamentally
gorgeous album. It is absolutely bursting at the seams with raw indie-rock beauty, as we witness on the breathtaking classical pianos that spring up across the record’s rugged landscape (this is most notably heard on the aesthetically stunning ‘Cobra’, ‘Half Real’, and ‘Au Pays du Cocaine’). From front to end, Geese also instill irresistible grooves that are nearly impossible not to sway or tap your toe to. There are plenty of artists out there who can make brazenly disheveled music, but very few who can do it with as much intricacy and melody as Geese almost instinctively seem to.
A lot of what makes
Getting Killed such a resonating experience is just that; instincts. It’s difficult to explain why “I’m getting killed by a pretty good life!” will give so many people a gut feeling of understanding, or why “There are microphones under your bed, and there's footage that will prove us both wrong” rings out like a universal truth. This album isn’t a call-to-arms, because it doesn’t tell anyone what to do about being on the shoe soles of consolidated wealth and power. A zeitgeist? Perhaps, because it captures so much of what makes these times so violent and unhinged, yet insufferably unfeeling and clinical. Whatever it is,
Getting Killed rounds up the anxiety, desperation, and existential dread of 2025 and delivers it in a way that no other band alive could. Such an adept distillation of a tumultuous era is rare, and
Getting Killed is an equally uncommon instant classic that should prove to be as valuable to its audience as those aforementioned indie-rock cornerstones once were in the late 90s and early 00s. It’s a different beast than those were, sure - but that’s the point.
Getting Killed blazes a new kind of trail for a new kind of time. As Cameron Winter sings on the final verse of the towering closer: “I have no idea where I'm going. Here I come.”
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