Album Review: Geese’s Getting Killed is a chaotic triumph of noise and tenderness

Brooklyn’s Geese have always thrived on tension, but Getting Killed — their third LP out via Partisan Records — is where they blow the whole thing wide open. Recorded with producer Kenneth Blume (better known as Kenny Beats), the record is an unpredictable collision of exorcism-level noise, dark humour and surprisingly tender songwriting.

It opens with “Trinidad”, a jolt of pure panic. Cameron Winter channels a howling Alan Wilson as he screams “there’s a bomb in my car!” over a terrifying backbeat. It’s a feral start, but Geese refuse to stay in one lane. Almost immediately they pivot into “Cobra”, a warped love song that slips from menace to intimacy in the space of a few lines. That contrast becomes the album’s lifeblood — an ever-shifting mood board where dread and beauty collide.

“Husbands” finds Winter more restrained, his deadpan vocals playing against surreal lyrics (“there’s a horse on my back / and I may be stomped flat”) as drummer Max Bassin anchors the chaos with pounding percussion. “Half Real” takes the absurd further, a tragicomic anthem that balances self-deprecation (“I’ve got half a mind / to just pay for the lobotomy”) with bruised melodies.

The title track, “Getting Killed”, is a discordant triumph, Winter’s voice soaring while the band somehow keep the song stitched together. Elsewhere, “100 Horses” drives relentlessly forward, while “Au Pays du Cocaine” slows the tempo into something tender, almost fragile. That sense of sudden shift — from ferocity to poignancy — becomes the record’s defining rhythm.

Lyrically, Winter takes aim at the world around him with sardonic bite. On “Taxes”, he sneers: “If you want me to pay my taxes / You better come over with a crucifix.” It’s funny and bleak at once — a neat summary of Geese’s worldview: young musicians staring down global turmoil with equal parts disgust and gallows humour.

The closer, “Long Island City Here I Come”, skitters along at breakneck pace, the band sounding like they’re racing the apocalypse. It’s chaotic, cathartic and weirdly euphoric — a finale that feels like the 2020s answer to the early-2000s garage rock explosion. If the Strokes defined the sound of a city in flux two decades ago, Geese now offer its cracked mirror image.

Getting Killed doesn’t just document a band in their early twenties trying to make sense of the world — it feels like a statement of intent, a grandiose attempt to wrestle absurdity, anxiety and fleeting beauty into one unruly package. And somehow, against the odds, they pull it off.