On a recent Friday night, the indie-rock band Geese—which formed in New York City in 2016, when its members were still a couple of years short of the legal driving age—played the final date of its North American tour. The show, at the Brooklyn Paramount, a baroque nineteen-twenties movie house turned concert hall, was a jubilant homecoming. (Even Mr. Met was in attendance, paying respects, perhaps, after the band’s bassist, Dominic DiGesu, told a reporter, “If there are going to be billionaires in the world, the Mets are the only thing worth funding, in my opinion.”) In the months since Geese released its third studio album, “Getting Killed,” the band has been rhapsodically heralded as the redeemer of a certain kind of noisy, lawless rock and roll. Critics love making such breathless declarations, and fans love to scoff at them. But isn’t controlled hysteria sort of the point? Geese itself is a dramatic outfit, prone to bursts of noise, meandering digressions, and feral bleating. Responding to this music with reason and reserve feels at odds, in some fundamental way, with its spirit.
At the Paramount—Friday was the second of two sold-out shows there—Geese’s front man, Cameron Winter, invited members of one of the opening bands onstage for an abbreviated cover of the Stooges’ “Fun House,” an almost eight-minute song, from 1970, about who knows what. (“Yeah, I came to play and I mean to play around / Yeah, I came to play and I mean to play real good.”) “Please welcome horns and shit like that,” Winter said, as the musicians ambled onstage. Geese is often compared to ambitious turn-of-the-millennium bands like Radiohead and the Strokes, but the Stooges might, in fact, be the most accurate analogue—attitudinally, if not quite musically. There’s a petulance to Geese, and especially to Winter, who has been known to mess around with journalists, fibbing, dodging questions, or giving deranged answers. (The band’s apparent lack of interest in projecting sincerity, or in earnestly engaging with the press, also feels very millennium-coded to me: ironic detachment, writ large.) I have come to enjoy this about Geese. I do not necessarily need my hand held after an album’s release, and Winter’s indifference when it comes to annotating his songwriting creates a kind of pleasant friction with the emotional intensity of the music itself. When the band appeared on “The Zane Lowe Show” recently, Winter responded to a question about the writing of “Husbands,” one of the album’s best and most fraught songs, by saying, “I don’t remember,” venturing only that it might have occurred near the Gowanus Canal, a famously putrid waterway in Brooklyn. “You know, a dolphin died in there last week . . . or something,” Winter offered. He was wearing sunglasses inside.
This approach works in part because “Getting Killed” is such a raw and unprotected art work. Winter is obviously someone who feels unusually deeply, even if he’s not very interested in performing cathexis outside the studio. At the show, I caught myself involuntarily tearing up during “Au Pays du Cocaine,” a loose, heart-wrenching song that builds to a kind of transcendent climax. It’s possible that the title is a warped allusion to Bruegel’s “Het Luilekkerland,” an oil painting, from 1567, that depicts the psychic aftermath of sloth and hedonism; “Het Luilekkerland” loosely translates to “The Land of Cockaigne,” a mythical medieval wonderland in which all appetites, however deviant, are satiated. (In proper French, the phrase would be “Le Pays de Cocagne.”) The connection might feel like a stretch, if only the limits (and perils) of contentment weren’t such a central theme in Winter’s lyrics. As he sings on the album’s title track, “I’m getting killed by a pretty good life.”
Of course, it’s hard to say precisely what “Au Pays du Cocaine” is about. Winter’s vocals are pleading, as though he is begging someone not to leave: “You can stay with me and just pretend I’m not there”; “You can be free and still come home”; “Baby, you can change and still choose me.” He sounds, to me, like a person in a faltering relationship trying to make whatever concessions are necessary to not get left. (Something about the song reminds me of an especially heartbreaking scene in the penultimate episode of “Mad Men,” in which Betty Draper, after being given a diagnosis of terminal lung cancer, tells her teen-age daughter, “I’ve learned to believe people when they tell you it’s over. They don’t want to say it, so it’s usually the truth.”) In the music video, Winter is seated at a dining table, singing to a baby. At the end, he walks upstairs, hoists himself into a crib, and assumes the fetal position. (When Winter was growing up, his parents had an open marriage, which his mother, Molly Roden Winter, described in somewhat exacting detail in a 2024 memoir, “More.”) At the Paramount, for whatever reason, the line that really got me is also one of the song’s most inscrutable: “Like a sailor in a big green boat.” It’s a meaningless image, which I suppose is central to its beauty—the potential for projection. It inevitably makes me think of people I have lost, now adrift in some unknowable sea. Winter’s voice, froggy and sad, filled the theatre. He played a leggy little guitar solo before the second verse. The tempo decelerated. I felt, briefly, as though something inside me was dissolving.
Even “Taxes,” possibly the most euphoric song on “Getting Killed,” is both darkly funny (“If you want me to pay my taxes / You better come over with a crucifix / You’re gonna have to nail me down”) and just dark (“Doctor, doctor, heal yourself / And I will break my own heart / I will break my own heart from now on”). These songs lean heavily on the marvel of Winter’s voice, wobbly and slurred, and on the drummer, Max Bassin, who plays with enormous restraint but a great deal of emotion. (The percussion on “Husbands,” one of my favorite tracks of the year, is slinky, nervous, weird, perfect.)
There’s a base level of melancholy and loneliness to everything Winter writes, which might have to do with the state of the modern world, or perhaps with the time during which he came of age. Winter, who is twenty-three, had recently turned eighteen when the COVID pandemic hit New York. In an appearance on the video series “A View from a Bridge,” in which guests stand outside and tell a story into a red telephone, Winter spoke about buying a virtual-reality headset during that tenuous, gruesome spring. He started messing around on a V.R. chat, and one day found himself on a Russian server set at a gas station in Siberia. He came upon two lovers in the snow. “Something about that was very tragic,” he said. “It was a very human moment and I think about it all the time.” It is possible that “Getting Killed” and its predecessor, “3D Country,” from 2023, are the first two great works of COVID-era music—not so much in their evocation of the events themselves but in the way the pandemic’s contours of isolation and fear seem to have shaped Winter’s consciousness at such a crucial moment in his life.
In Brooklyn, Geese came back onstage for an encore. “This is the last show of the U.S. tour, which would make this the last song,” Winter said. “We only thought it right to end this tour with a cover of Waylon Jennings, the legend who lives on in our hearts.” The band began playing “Trinidad,” the track that opens “Getting Killed.” It is decidedly not a Waylon Jennings song, although I suppose it shares a kind of coarse outlaw ethos. “I try,” Winter moaned. The guitarist, Emily Green, played an antsy little riff. “I try / I try so hard.” Winter took a sharp breath. “I try,” he sang again, before leaning into the song’s frantic, screamed refrain: “There’s a bomb in my car!” The crowd went nuts—crowd-surfing, moshing, collapsing on itself. Lights flashed. There was a feeling of giddy, collective release. Green, still fiddling with a guitar pedal, was the last to leave the stage. The crowd filed from the theatre, dazed, satiated, the good kind of emptied out. ♦
