FEATURE:
The Best Albums of 2025
Geese - Getting Killed
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I want to start out…
IN THIS PHOTO: Max Bassin, Emily Green, Cameron Winter and Dominic DiGesu/PHOTO CREDIT: Lewis Evans
with an interview from DIY concerning Geese and their album, Getting Killed. One of the best of this year, I want to take you inside of this album. The Brooklyn band is made up of Cameron Winter, Dominic DiGesu, Emily Green, and Max Bassin. A band that are proving they are worthy of all the hype around them right now, it is fascinating learning how they first emerged “in lockdown with their brand of restless, chaotic rock and roll, through to playing frenzied secret shows and shutting down streets in Brooklyn just a few years on, New York’s Geese are very much the band of the hour right now”:
“Winter is characteristically understated when talking about the show, and the album release as a whole. “Yeah… pretty good,” he says, in a tone almost entirely devoid of enthusiasm. It’s probably worth noting at this point that Cameron isn’t known for being the most straightforward of interviewees. He treats press as an extension of his bizarre lyrics, sometimes outwardly lying (he has claimed that a five-year-old played bass on ‘Heavy Metal’) and pausing for minutes on end whilst working out what he wants to say. Speaking over Zoom today, sat outside a café, he explains that his perception of his solo album having failed (“because it took a little while for it to get off the ground”) informed ‘Getting Killed’ in that it made him think, “‘Alright, I’m gonna do [it] better, I’m gonna do a fixed version with the band that’s louder and less… sleepy’.”
Regardless, he’s totally bemused by not only his solo success, but also his band’s. “I don’t know how or why, but people started liking it more, and I think that let people give me the benefit of the doubt more than ever before, you know?” he says, looking into the middle distance. “Before, when we were to do certain things, people would [say], ‘these guys don’t know what they’re doing!’, but now they’re willing to jump on the bandwagon more easily, maybe.” It seems that Geese are fairly immune to external views of their work, and are their own critics first and foremost. “I guess we get bored, we’re just overly self-conscious about some things. We don’t want to make the same stuff, because it’s embarrassing for us.”
So what exactly were the band chasing on ‘Getting Killed’? “A lot of what we were trying to do was focus on groove,” notes Bassin, perhaps not unsurprisingly for a drummer. “We all got really into free jazz, and some funk. Everything went a little full-circle; we were listening to a lot of proto-punk stuff, which is really influenced by a lot of funk stuff, which is influenced by a lot of jazz stuff. It all kind of went backwards in that direction.” It’s true that much of the album - such as the insistent pulse of ‘Islands of Men’ - has an almost circular feel, more indebted to jazz structures than a traditional verse-chorus-bridge. Max describes it as “playing around some sort of groove that feels almost like it doesn’t end.”
Both Cameron and Max separately use the word ‘fix’ to describe their approach to writing, perhaps belying their relentless push to reinvent themselves. “We hold ourselves to a very high standard, but then also, sometimes it’s tough to see when it’s just too much,” explains Max. “But then, to fix it is just to find the place where it clicks for all of us, where all of us get really excited about it. Because [when] we’ve let songs sit, and re-recorded them in a totally different way, it’s been like, ‘oh, that’s how it’s supposed to sound, perfect’.”
This restlessness also seems to mean that they take nobody else’s opinion on their music seriously. “When stuff comes out, I don’t believe anybody,” says Cameron. “[Regarding] the people who are speaking negatively about it, I just think ‘well, you just don’t get it, you stupid idiot!’” He grins: “‘just give it a minute - you should listen to it seven more times at least before you take a stupid opinion like that!’ And then, with the people who love it to death, I’m just like, ‘oh, these bandwagon-jumpers, they don’t even know why they like it, they’re just lying to themselves, they’re trying to spin a narrative’. I just don’t believe anybody. I don’t know what would make me… I don’t know what would satisfy me in that regard.”
‘Getting Killed’ concludes with ‘Long Island City Here I Come’, an extraordinary closing moment featuring a relentless piano line and Winter’s fraught crooning, which reaches fever pitch as he incants “here I come, here I come” over and over. “It was pretty obvious once we recorded it that none of the other songs would make as much sense as the last one,” he says. “It was a solo song first, and then just on a lark we tried it as a full band, and I thought ‘wow, this is way better’. So there it was.”
Winter’s voice feels, at times, like a character itself on the record - truly one of those strange, virtuosic singing voices that feels entirely unlike anyone else. When asked how it came about, Winter seems puzzled by the question. “I don’t know. I’m just not very self-conscious about it, and that can lead to some weird places, and that’s kind of just how I sing. I’m really not trying an effect or anything.” This, really, gets to the heart of his appeal as a songwriter – he seems totally disconnected from how his work might be perceived, and is just making something completely off the wall. “It’s a weird mix of being totally unself-conscious, and also being pretty disciplined, too. A lack of self-consciousness doesn’t mean you should be lazy or anything. [You shouldn’t be] so unself-conscious that you put out something terrible, that sort of just flops over and dies.”
At this point, it doesn’t seem like that’s a concern for Geese. It also appears that, at least according to other interviews, ‘Getting Killed’’s follow-up could already be recorded. Cameron groans at the mention of this. “That’s overblown. I want to put that to rest, because I feel so bad, everyone’s getting so excited about it. That’s not really what’s happening - we’re just kind of dicking around,” he says, shaking his head. So, no new Geese album come Monday? “No, no, no… Tuesday at least. I’m breaking the news in DIY, that that’s basically a rumour that GQ has propagated.”
As ever with Geese, it’s hard to know where exactly we are in the grey area between the truth as Cameron sees it and the truth as the rest of the band see it, given their frontman’s penchant for fibbing for sport. Max smirks when asked if a new album exists: “Maybe.” After a pause, he leans in, smiling. “I don’t know, actually. To be entirely honest, I want to say maybe, but also then I’ll talk to Cameron and he’ll say ‘it’s not done. It’s not even anywhere done, we’ve got to cut half of these songs’. So we’ll see.”
If this ambiguous follow-up is anything like ‘Getting Killed’, then we’re in for a treat. But for the moment - much like everyone else - we’re at the whim of Cameron Winter”.
Prior to getting to a couple of reviews for Geese’s Getting Killed, there is another interview I am highlighting. I spotlighted the band earlier in the year, so I am trying not to repeat anything I included back then. THE FACE spoke with Brooklynite Alex Winter. Hailed as one of the greatest songwriters of his generation, you can’t argue with that claim when you listen to Getting Killed. If you have not heard of Geese, then go and seek out this amazing band:
“Winter is cautious of how transient the noise around a work of art is, how it’s inversely proportional to its potential staying power. “It really ruins it when you talk about anything,” he says. “I cringe whenever I say anything about my music, it feels gratuitous.” If you spend enough time with Winter’s music, you might understand where he’s coming from. The heart-in-throat folk and lonely soul of Heavy Metal and the omnivorous experimental rock of Getting Killed have been distilled from recording sessions so stuffed with ideas the songs sound as though they’re constantly on the verge of bursting.
Winter’s writing is dense with allusion, from Hellenic odes like Heavy Metal’s Nausicäa (Love Will Be Revealed) and Getting Killed’s Sisyphean Husbands, to the cocksure pantomime of American imperialism on 100 Horses and Au Pays du Cocaine. One of his trademarks is the deftness of his rock references. On Heavy Metal’s The Rolling Stones, he nods to the keening Midwest emo of Tigers Jaw, folding a fragment of their soul-bearing refrain, “But my emotions ran unopposed /I felt just like Brian Jones,” into his tumbling folk dedication to trying and failing to write the perfect song. At times it’s both sillier and more subtle. Try singing, “I came up here to sleep in your infamous kitchen,” from Cancer of the Skull in your best Bob Dylan voice. Now, think of Dylan as you hear Winter sing the line, “Songs are meant for bad singers.”
Winter closes Getting Killed by calling out to Buddy Holly, Don McLean and folk legend Pete Seger on the epic Long Island City Here I Come, while the rest of Geese furiously careen through a crumbling wall of sound. “It’s a human thing to copy other people,” he says. “It’s how you learn to speak, it’s how you learn to walk, you copy, so when people don’t copy at all it feels like a rejection of the fact that they’re just flesh and blood.” Winter is no exception. “A lot of stuff I make starts too derivative and then I just cringe at it listening back, so I have to find a different way until I stop cringing,” he levels. “The question is always: how much allusion can I tolerate?’
Winter is aware of the pitfalls of wanting to sound like the greats. Though it’s hard not to hear Van Morrison’s 1968 classic Astral Weeks in Heavy Metal, he deflects the comparison. “In about 40 years I’ll have my anti-vax magnum opus, a triple album about government overreach will be hitting the shelves,” he quips, referencing Morrison’s spate of lockdown protest songs in 2020. “It would be funny if I really sped through my recording career like that, being the grumpy old man on stage right now,” he adds, grinning.
To make a great song, he says, “it has to grab ya, without you grabbing it. It has to be mutual and most of the time it’s not.” When it’s not, Winter is quick to rebuke his more perfectionist tendencies, confessing, “I tweak more than I record” on a Reddit AMA the day of Heavy Metal’s release. “Being perfectionist is dishonest, in a way,” he says. “Your ass ain’t perfect! I like music that doesn’t have its guard up all the time.” On that subject, Winter praises New York rap experimentalist Xaviersobased (“there’s very few people who are really just saying fuck the rules as much as he is”) and London’s fakemink (“he can really run with it”), citing their perfectly fried production and prolific release schedules as something to strive for. “They’ve got the right idea,” he smiles. “I want that to be Geese and me eventually, to break free of the freaking album cycles and just put it out the moment it’s done. To pick a thing off your camera roll and kick it out there”.
The Line of Best Fit opened with lines about how Geese were debuting songs off their third album over the summer, and there was a projection behind them that read “Geese: A real band”. It makes you wonder why they did that and whether they were being seen as a novelty or insubstantial:
“When Geese toured their last album, 3D Country, the projection read "An American Band" because that’s what they were then, a group of incredibly forward-thinking classic rock revivalists. If there’d been a projection for their first album, Projector, it would’ve said "A New York Band" due to their debut's mix of CBGB’s post-punk with the math rock it inspired. But Getting Killed is the work of "a real band" or at the very least a band not hiding behind pastiche. It’s Geese at their most honest and sincere, and as a result, their most brilliant, creative, and manic.
While the release of his much-acclaimed solo debut Heavy Metal has clearly left lead singer Cameron Winter even stronger in both vocals and lyrics than before that record's success, it hasn’t caused Geese to play backup to him. Rather, the rest of the band has grown with him. Producer Kenny Beats has brought the rhythm section to the forefront, revealing them to be Geese’s strongest element. Dominic DiGesu’s basslines are more prominent than ever, combining a delirious boogie funk with a raw and enticing tone. While drummer Max Bassin has always appeared to be of a higher class than most, Beats really lets him shine. On “Trinidad”, he makes the kit sound like an imploding submarine as it rattles against Winter’s explosive vocals. Yet to view the players separately is to reduce their impact. Getting Killed is an album built around a band; their unity creates its best moments.
The band is operating tighter than ever, their core style now a sort of motorik-funk, with Winter’s gospel vocals combining with rhythms that lie somewhere between Can and Funkadelic. On tracks like “Bow Down” and “100 Horses”, they unite into a marching stomp that recalls the grizzled trample of the Bad Seeds and the junkyard blues of Tom Waits. Yet the band really reaches its peak when it extends these jams past the four-minute limit. Title track “Getting Killed” is close to their finest work ever, with its initial crunch giving way to guitar interplay and a heartbreaking coda of chanted vocals as Winter howls the track and album’s title.
Yet the two other big jams come close to dethroning its excellence. “Islands of Men" starts as a piece of swaying boogie rock before reforming into something ethereal, a slice of dream rock grounded by a flurry of horns and percussion that gives way into chaos. But the real pinnacle is the album's closer “Long Island City Here I Come”. It’s initial ripple of drums and keys combine with Winter’s ramblings about "God having many friends" and "Microphones hidden under your bed" to seem like a surreal reimagining of Patti Smith’s "Piss Factory". Yet rather than switching tactics like the others the groove simply continues. A thrush of additional instruments compliments Winters vocals as they reach new apexes. His lyrics contort a series of absurdist tales into a bizarrely inspirational message of desperate youth and hope as he cries out "Long Island City, here I come."
But these moments of magnitude aren’t what make Getting Killed a masterpiece. Rather, it’s the way they fit together. The way a line as tender as "Baby let me dance away forever" can feel appropriate after the neo-no-wave car wreck of “Trinidad”. The way that “Au Pays du Cocaine” sways on such a tender breeze. It’s how all those Winter’s lyrics, their delightful mix of tender love calls, historical anachronism, and biblical imagery, all come together to turn the joyous heartland ballad "Taxes" crushingly tragic when he says, "I will break my own heart from now on." Like the band that made it, Getting Killed is an album of insane synchronicity, its individual elements rocketing one another into new stratospheres. If Geese are a real band, then Getting Killed is a real album. One that cements them as no longer excellent imitators of the bands they once tipped their hats to, but worthy equals”.
In another 9/10 review, CLASH shared their opinions about an album that will rank alongside the best of the year. Getting Killed is definitely going to be a hard act to follow through, with Geese, you feel like they will top it with something even more extraordinary:
“It’s usually pointless to predict when a band might ascend to stardom, but if you placed your bets on Geese this year, the odds are certainly in your favour. The New York indie-rock band have made a dizzying ascension, buoyed by the critical acclaim that followed the release of frontman and lead vocalist Cameron Winter’s debut solo record ‘Heavy Metal’ last year. So uncertain were its commercial odds that it got slated with a December release date, which slowed initial pickup but has had the intriguing effect of creating consistently growing streams for the best part of 2025, creating a halo of interest that’s reflected back onto Geese’s new offering ‘Getting Killed’.
Even before ‘Heavy Metal’, Geese were already a growing force to be reckoned with, as their 2023 concept-record-that’s-not-a-concept-record ‘3D Country’ proved. In ‘Getting Killed’, the band only benefits from Winters’ solo turn. It’s not just his voice that feels stronger, but the work of his bandmates too: Dominic DiGesu, Emily Green, and Max Bassin. They’ve also benefited from the production support of Kenneth Blume (Kenny Beats), with whom they recorded the album in a month-long stretch. It’s a collaboration that’s led to a sound that’s cleaner, still heavily layered but a more clearly defined sum of its parts.
In ‘Getting Killed’, there’s points of lyricism that are wildly obscure, like when Winters sings “All the horses must go dancing” in ‘100 Horses’, or the defining refrain “There’s a bomb in my car” of opening single Trinidad. But there’s also a return to the teenage earnestness of their first album ‘Projector’, newly refracted through ‘Heavy Metal’, a record that’s defined by catharsis and longing. In ‘Half Real’, Winters’ trembling voice soars through lyrics spanning heartbreak and uncertainty, while ‘Husbands’ gestures to the feeling of being weighed down by the city that you love.
It’s certainly not an easy-listening album, and sometimes it can sound downright unpleasant, like in opening stomper ‘Trinidad’, which teeters on the verge of a disconcerting chaos. Like ‘3D Country’, it’s music that rewards re-listening: each play reveals something new. Whether it’s the complexity with which Bassin commands the drums in ‘100 Horses’, a choice use of backing vocals in titular single ‘Getting Killed’, a perfectly steady bassline in ‘Islands Of Men’, Winters’ receding voice in ‘Long Island City Here I Come’, there’s a constant attention to detail throughout the course of the record.
This isn’t to say that there’s not standout singles as well: ‘Taxes’ is a catchy and cathartic rock hit, and ‘Cobra’s nostalgic guitar melodies are deeply compelling. But ‘Getting Killed’ is an album designed for the dedicated listener over the passerby, better experienced in its whole than in individual parts. It’s a bold proposition and one that places the band firmly within the future of the rock canon. That’s what makes Geese’s work so exciting: uncompromising, they look steadily forwards, pushing at the seams of what their sound can do”.
One of my picks for album of the year, Getting Killed is a masterpiece from Geese. I am interested to see what steps they make next year. From January, they are on tour, and they have some amazing dates in the diary. They start a run of U.K. dates from 20th March and play the Eventim Apollo on 25th. Make sure you catch them if you can. Getting Killed proves that this quartet are…
THE real deal.