Geese, a band of prophecy and parable, returns with the jubilant ‘Getting Killed’

Dancing and dying. It’s what we do. 

I usually try to avoid sweeping pronouncements about the entire course of history—the mark of a callow writer—but I think it’s safe to say that death and dance remain pillars of our existence. They are maybe the pillars, the two actions that define human life more than anything else. Whatever form it may take, dance is the physical expression of our immaterial consciousness. Being alive is dancing. And eventually all earthly dances have to end. 

The literary tradition of juxtaposing dance and death stretches back to the Book of Exodus, when Miriam led the Israelites in dance to celebrate the crossing of the Red Sea. It’s touched on in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving piece of literature. 

So can anything original possibly be said about dancing and death? The answer is yes, actually. Geese just did it. 

Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of Geese. Despite the noise they have been making for a few years in indie-rock circles, they themselves told Rolling Stone in August that 2025 has been their breakthrough year. But you should get to know them now (and learn that they’re different from the jam band Goose; not the same people).

The members of Geese—drummer Max Bassin, bassist Dominic DiGesu, guitarist Emily Green and singer Cameron Winter—met in high school and almost broke up once college acceptances rolled in. Luckily for us, their music hit the right ears at the right time. They signed to Partisan Records in 2020. 

On Sept. 26, Geese released their fourth studio LP, titled “Getting Killed.” It’s a deeply original, funny, jubilant meditation on going out with a bang and a two-step. Through 11 sprawling tracks that name-drop Joshua, Solomon, Charlemagne and Joan of Arc, the band embraces a language of prophecy and parable that gives the whole album a mystical feel. That’s fitting, given the material. “Getting Killed” has plenty to say about the nature of love and life. It does so with a tongue-in-cheek weirdness that feels unabashed and refreshing, once you stop trying to solve it like a puzzle. 

“I should burn in hell/ I should burn in hell/ But I don’t deserve this/ Nobody deserves this.” The first track released from this album was a July single called “Taxes,” which opens with these lines over gently thumping tom drums and subdued guitar. The song goes on: “If you want me to pay my taxes/ If you want me to pay my taxes/ You better come over with a crucifix/ You’re going to have to nail me down.” 

After Winter delivers those two sections in his trademark vibrato, the song’s rich, full arrangement kicks in. Speed and energy builds under the supervision of breathless drum fills and a trumpeting guitar riff. It feels like taking flight. The music video for the song, staged at a live Geese performance, walks us through the band’s stiff, nonchalant crowd for the first half of “Taxes.” Once the beat hits, however, everyone starts jumping and slamming and writhing like religious ecstatics. 

This was how Geese introduced “Getting Killed” to the world. “Taxes” uses the crucifix to represent the victory of life over death, but even more, the image signals the attitude the singer is taking toward his fate. It’s not just acceptance of the possibility of suffering and death. It’s a defiant challenge, full of transcendent joy and secure in the faith that whatever darkness holds us down cannot do so forever. Winter ends the song with a powerful claim of agency, saying he “will break his own heart from now on.”

“Taxes” ended up as the penultimate track on the album, right before “Long Island City Here I Come,” a song that reads like a frantically condensed Divine Comedy.

Geese has an incredible talent for writing one-liners. There are phrases in this album that make me pause in the middle of a song so I can hold the words in my mouth and let them melt. “A masterpiece belongs to the dead.” “Until I come home, I am not anyone.” “The Sunday crowds are all my concubines and my enemies.” All these lines come from “Long Island City,” sprinkled in among the singer’s existential conversations with St. Joan of Arc and King Charlemagne. 

There’s a temptation to try and figure out what this song means, to pick it apart and dissect it. I feel that temptation throughout the album. I think the music is best served by resisting that urge and letting it speak on its own terms. And I think that’s intentional—last year, Winter received major critical acclaim with his emotional, cerebral solo album “Heavy Metal”; he was cast almost overnight as a Gen Z Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen. Plenty of listeners will be looking for Part 2 of “Heavy Metal” in “Getting Killed.” They won’t find it. Not exactly. 

There are love songs on “Getting Killed,” where dancing and death represent the emotional push and pull of a relationship. On “Cobra,” Winter croons, “Baby, let me dance away from you forever,” and later remarks, “You can make the cobras dance/ But not me, yeah/ There’s a cobra in my hand.” The snake dances because it is hypnotized or charmed; dancing of one’s own volition, though, is a way to express individuality and make a stand against someone trying to exert control. 

The album’s title track is an uptempo rocker driven by Green’s excellent guitar work. Winter sings, “I can’t even hear myself talk/ I’m trying to talk over everybody in the world.” What’s killing him, he says, is “a pretty good life,” one that has restricted his motion for too long. He vows, “I’m getting up to leave/ I am taking off my pants/ I’m getting out of this gumball machine.” In other words, he’s taking control of his body again, because the alternative is death. 

The centerpiece of the album is “100 Horses,” a modern-day “Fortunate Son” that frames war as the great revealer of truths. True human nature comes to light in its carnage. We are creatures of the chase who find meaning in pursuit of goals, not in the goals themselves: “All people stop smiling/ once they get what they’ve been begging for.” We try to distract ourselves from the reality of imminent death: “All people in times of war/ must go down to the circus.” And in these circumstances, the act of affirming our humanity—through dancing, of course—takes on a spiritual significance that overshadows everything else.

Or all of that could be wrong. There’s so much imagery on “Getting Killed”—TVs abandoned on the side of the road and green boats sailing on green oceans—that it’s easy to grab onto a string and pull, hoping the whole album will unravel neatly. I haven’t had any luck so far. Overall, it’s less accessible than “3D Country,” Geese’s 2023 LP about cowboys and frontiers and monsters destroying the world. I think it asks the listener to work a little harder. 

After each time through, I’ve come back to the album artwork as an emblem of what “Getting Killed” is all about. It’s pretty dumb and funny, on its face: a grainy photo of a silhouette in the sun, with the figure holding a trumpet in one hand and a pistol in the other. There’s a cosmic balance to the picture: the viewer’s eyes are drawn to the instrument of music and the instrument of death. The person holding the instruments, obfuscated by sunlight, could pull the trigger or blow the horn. Or both, at the very same instant. 

• Facebook
• X
• Mail