FEATURE: Spotlight: Geese — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Geese

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BUSY at the moment…

PHOTO CREDIT: Griffin Lotz for Rolling Stone

touring and promoting their acclaimed new album, Getting Killed, many new faces are discovering the magnificent Geese. I am quite new to them. They have been in the business a little while, though now really is a time when they are getting a lot of attention and love. I am going to get to some interviews with the Brooklyn band of Max Bassin, Emily Green, Dominic DiGesu, and Cameron Winter. Even though they are four albums deep, especially in this country, they are appearing on the radar of some big music websites. I would say they are still a new band. Definitely one that deserves to be spotlighted. Before getting to some interviews, a brief bit of biography from Partisan Records:

“New York City’s Geese return with their highly anticipated 3rd studio album, ‘Getting Killed’. After being approached by Kenneth Blume at a music festival, Geese tracked the album in his LA studio over the course of ten fast-paced days.

With scant time for overdubbing, the finished project emerges as something of a chaotic comedy, shambolic in structure but passionately performed, informed by an exacting vision. Garage riffs are layered upon Ukrainian choir samples; hissing drum machines pulse softly behind screeching guitars; strange, lullaby-esque songs are interspersed with furious, repetitive experiments. With ‘Getting Killed,’ Geese balances a disarming new tenderness with an intensified anger, seemingly trading their love of classic rock for a disdain for music itself”.

I am going to start out with an expansive and detailed interview from GQ. They spend five days with Geese. They note how these friends, five years ago, were on the verge of breaking up; “But between the solo debut of singer Cameron Winter and their stunning new album, Getting Killed, Geese have quickly become a band on a potentially historic run”. It is a very long interview, so I have taken parts that are of particular interest. Though I would recommend that you read the entire thing:

“But what, I want to know on this Sunday morning, about their own past? During the last five years, since they signed a record deal at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, a few repeated narrative threads have converged for Geese. They are upper-middle-class New York kids who started a band in high school and were about to break up when Covid cancelled their college plans. They are quiet, weird, and funny—or, as Bassin puts it with a smile, “All super fucking undiagnosed autistic, terrible hangs.” They are not to be confused with Goose, because one bird can only entertain you for so long.

Geese have managed their story so successfully, in part, because Winter can be so guarded in interviews. When asked something, he pauses for so long it’s tempting to interrupt the silence and ask something else. In our five hours of conversation, I spend at least thirty cumulative minutes waiting him out. (He and his mom think this stems from a concussion he got while playing hockey in eighth grade, though his dad insists it’s simply his nature.) When he answers, the response is very often a very good joke or even a lie, like a trap carefully set in chess. He has insisted he made Heavy Metal in various Guitar Centre stores around New York (not true) and once told The New York Times that Geese employed a little elfin helper named Ezekiel (I have yet to meet him).

Only two minutes after we sit down outside, Winter tries one of his trademark quips. When I ask about the first time he met Kenny Beats, the burly and gregarious producer who made Getting Killed and will meet Geese back in his studio in two hours, Winter tells me how Beats—who has since changed his professional name to Kenny Blume—stormed into the band’s backstage tent during Austin City Limits last year and demanded they work together. He compares Blume to Godzilla. “So we pepper-sprayed him,” Winter deadpans.

No one in Geese quite knew what to make of Kenny Beats, back before Winter convinced him once and for all just to be Kenny Blume.

In the summer of 2024, Blume had gone to see his old friends in King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard for two nights at Forest Hills Stadium. He missed the opening act, but he admired the gumption of their merchandise—namely, a T-shirt that read Geese inside the Oasis logo, above a picture of the Beatles. Was that even legal? He asked a friend about Geese’s deal. “They’re just these smartass kids from Brooklyn,” he said.

The smartass beatmaker from Connecticut was intrigued enough to see them on night two, then to download 3D Country, then to fall steadily for the record’s busted Ween-meets-Queen outlandishness. When he saw Geese in Los Angeles a few weeks later, he spied other hotshot producers in the room and decided the time probably wasn’t right to court them. He couldn’t help himself. “I don’t know what came over me,” he tells me. “But I knew I couldn’t work with anybody but these guys. I just had to make music with these kids.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Jeremy Liebman

Blume emailed managers, labels, and friends, trying to set up a meeting with Geese. He heard they already had time booked in January with a famous peer, but he didn’t care. So in October, when they were both playing Austin City Limits on the same day, he barged into their tent, took a deep bong rip, and did something he does very, very well: started talking. The bong belonged to Bassin and DiGesu, so they paid attention. Green was more circumspect, sizing him up from across the tent. Winter, meanwhile, sat with his feet on a chair, his head tucked so far between his knees that he never made eye contact.

“I don’t know why I was confident enough to say the word ‘horny,’ but I said, ‘I’m horny for mistakes,’” Blume says, flashing his infectious smile. “And then Cameron looked at me, through me, like I said the fucking secret code word to a speakeasy.”

Winter liked the idea of capturing his imperfect band and his odd voice with someone who was also horny for mistakes. “Astral Weeks is a good example. Van Morrison hates that album, partially because he’s a dick and he’s stupid,” Winter says with a little glint in his eyes. “But also because he only hears the mistakes, you know? He doesn’t have it in his brain to hear that the mistakes are the best thing he ever did.”

In their rush of albums and in their dazzlingly fast rise from a good band to, on Getting Killed, an astounding one, it can get lost just how young the members of Geese remain. They were the only kids in their elite high schools to forego college, opting to get their education this way, at least for now. They are growing up, on stage and on tape. They are not only becoming a band but adults in their early 20s, too.

When I ask Sam Revaz, Geese’s touring keyboardist, about this evolution late one night, he grins and sighs. Revaz is 28, five years older than the other members of Geese. He finished his jazz piano performance degree at New York University the year before Geese had a record deal. Yes, they’ve encountered transphobia and racism in certain recesses of the country (Bassin's mom is Chinese), but he says they’ve rolled over it like a speed bump, a piece of someone else’s past with which they needn’t be concerned in the present.

“With Emily transitioning, we were all a little scared at first, given the state of the country,” Revaz says. “But it’s been really clear to me from the jump that they’re not insecure about what other people think of them. And also, we have each other to lean on”.

Before getting a review of Getting Killed from NME, I want to bring in some of Rolling Stone’s interview with a hugely innovative and young Rock band. It is clear that the Rock scene is as healthy and diverse as it has ever been. Getting Killed is one of many standout Rock albums from this year. Although a lot of the interview – and many from this year – talk about Cameron Winter’s 2024 solo album, Heavy Metal (which provides important context but does hog too much of the conversation time), Getting Killed is very much the focus. An exciting new Geese album:

“Getting Killed, out Sept. 26, is Geese’s most formidable album yet. DiGesu and Bassin cut deeper, craggier grooves. Green swings her guitar between halcyon and haywire, and Winter sings — he just flat-out sings, a nimble and mighty vocal contortionist with one of the most distinct voices in music.

“They’ve been put in this jam-band space. They’ve been put in this ‘smart kids in New York who play instruments good’ space,” Blume says. “They’ve been branded in all of these different ways. And they really wanted to say something different with this music.”

But as self-assured as this record often sounds, the empty toiling of hand-clap day shows just how different everything was when Geese flew to Los Angeles in early January to record with Blume, who’s produced several rock records but is still best known for his work with rappers like Vince Staples, Denzel Curry, and Rico Nasty. The band arrived in his studio with about 20 demos, but few resembled full songs. Blume says he could hear in them a “huge shift in texture, ambiance, and purpose,” but it was far from clear how they could actualize it all. For a group driven by a creative restlessness, a desire to distinguish themselves from both predecessor and peer, Geese felt woefully underprepared. Completely directionless. Also, Los Angeles was on fire.

“As stressed as they were about making a great record,” Blume says, “add this on top of it, it wasn’t easy.”

For a full month, Geese trekked back and forth between their shared home in Mid City and Blume’s studio near the University of Southern California. There was little to do but work. They weren’t particularly close to the fires, but smoke choked the skies and the open-air atrium Blume had built into the studio was covered in dust and ash.

True New Yorkers, no one in Geese has a driver’s license. And L.A. isn’t exactly a walkable city, as many stranded East Coasters have learned before.

“The amount of steps I got daily was atrocious,” Green deadpans.

“Oh, buddy, it was great,” Bassin says. “I love Uber.”

Making Getting Killed wasn’t easy, Winter admits. “I was unhappy until the last possible moment,” he says. “Maybe even still. The whole process — maybe this is just how we make albums — but it’s all kind of a waking nightmare until it’s mastered.”

“It does feel like a brute-force effort until the very end,” Green adds.

And then a few minutes later, Winter’s joking about how, if they ever want to make a triumphant comeback album, they have to start “making dogshit quick.” He adds: “We just do it for the ‘critical reception’ part of the Wikipedia article.”

“That and the fucking snacks, dude,” Bassin says.

ROCK & ROLL HAS been around for so long, endured so many deaths, that even its most striking revivals can resemble grave robberies. The risks of tumbling into that pit — a literal nostalgia trap — are high. Geese have garnered comparisons to Television and Zeppelin, the Strokes and the Stones, Deep Purple and Gang of Four, just to name a few. But like rock’s best crooks, they are beginning to excel at leaving a trail of tantalizing clues while always getting away with the heist.

“For a band that reminds people of so many acts they were really trying to combat nostalgia in certain ways, without having to say that,” Blume tells me.

Loren Humphrey, a close studio collaborator of Geese who co-produced Winter’s solo album, echoes the sentiment. “They’re really passionate about trying to do something different,” he says. “A lot of the artists that I’ve worked with, or even just sessions that I’ve been around, all of the production seems so referential. Like, ‘Let’s make the drum sound exactly like this.’ It was cool to see these kids coming and it’s the opposite. They don’t want to reference anything.”

Blume, too, mentions Geese’s aversion to nostalgia while discussing the way they incorporated samples on Getting Killed, like the auxiliary production clattering off Bassin’s drums in “Taxes” and the chopped loop of a Ukrainian choir ululating over crunchy guitar riffs on “Getting Killed” (though not, sadly, handclaps).

Geese have been playing music together for nearly 10 years now. They know how to navigate disagreements and spend two months in a van together. They’ve also spread out over the city. DiGesu still resides on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where he grew up; Winter has landed in Bed-Stuy; and Bassin and Green have found homes in Ridgewood, Queens. They see each other at shows, and at practice of course, but the hangs are less frequent than they used to be.

“There’s so many parts in my life that fulfill requirements that can’t be met by these three people,” Green says.

“Exactly,” Bassin adds. “It helps that we remain close, but it certainly feels like a work and play separation”.

Getting Killed has scored a run of five-star reviews. It is such a thrilling album. One that will be talked about for many years to come. I want to include NME’s review. The band are coming to the U.K. in March. We have a bit of a long wait to see them. I have never seen them live so, when they come this way, I will try and see if I can grab a ticket. It will be electric hearing Getting Killed’s songs played on the stage:

“Since putting out their debut album ‘Projector’ in 2021, Geese have become one of the most respected bands of their generation. The former NME Cover stars have built a fierce reputation for making consistently interesting, experimental indie–rock that makes you believe original ideas still exist, even as they reference acts who’ve come before them. Their growth has been a word-of-mouth sensation, chatter around that first LP – a solid slice of post-punk thrills – getting increasingly louder with 2023’s country-tinged rock’n’roll record ‘3D Country’ and frontman Cameron Winter’s acclaimed solo debut ‘Heavy Metal’ last year.

Now, with their third album ‘Getting Killed’, Geese feel on the verge of proper cult superstardom. That’s in part thanks to ‘Heavy Metal’ carving out more space for Winter as a magnetic presence – the kind of artist where you don’t know if his interview answers are real or bullshit, and whose stream-of-consciousness seems to produce work that feels both profound and impenetrable. It’s also thanks, though, to the whole band’s commitment to keeping their fans guessing, trying out new things and not being afraid to get a little weird.

That approach remains intact on ‘Getting Killed’, obvious from its opening – ‘Trinidad’’s noodling guitars and Winter wailing, “There’s a bomb in my car” over blasts of discordant noise. Sonically, this album feels like a natural stepping stone from both ‘3D Country’ and ‘Heavy Metal’, losing more of the Americana feel of the former in favour of warm but unconventional rock’n’roll collages. The title track centres around a bluesy guitar riff and a cut-up loop of a Ukrainian choir layered over it, while ‘Taxes’ grows from syncopated percussion to a chiming guitar topline that could have been pulled from a Stone Roses record.

There’s a lingering feeling of something spiritual happening on ‘Getting Killed’. Sometimes that comes through in Winter’s delivery, which often feels like a rambling but engaging preacher delivering his teachings to a rapt congregation. At others, it’s the imagery he uses in the lyrics, like in ‘Taxes’ when he sighs, “I should burn in hell / But I don’t deserve this”, and later warns: “If you want me to pay my taxes / You better come over with a crucifix / You’re gonna have to nail me down”.

In the lead up to ‘Getting Killed’’s release, Geese told Rolling Stone they had spent one day in the recording process so focused on choosing a handclap sample that they’d forgotten “to make the song”. There’s so much going on in this album that it feels like it would have been easy for the five-piece to lose sight of the bigger picture, yet for all its abrupt shifts and intricate details, ‘Getting Killed’ somehow doesn’t ever feel like there’s too much at play or like its creators aren’t in complete control. Instead, this is a band living up to their reputation as exhilaratingly free-spirited, not so much proving they deserve all the accolades and fervent fanaticism bubbling around them but demanding it”.

I hope what I have included in this features tempts anyone who does not know about Geese to check them out. I am relatively new to them, so I am not especially aware of their earliest days and their story. However, whilst researching for this feature and listening to Getting Killed, it has instilled this respect. A band who are repurposing, revitalising and reviving this Rock spirit. In their own way. Even if this is their fourth album and they are pretty much established, I would say that Geese are…