Geese - Getting Killed
Rock – Released September 26, 2025 – 11 songs, 46 mins
LUNDI
Efforts to find a modern career trajectory comparison for this week’s breakout band Geese turned up empty, which isn’t exactly that surprising given the lack of mainstream love for up and coming rock bands over the last 15+ years. Guitar driven music has for the most part been cast aside, dropped to smaller festival fonts and booking auditoriums, but at the ripe age of twenty two Cameron Winter has guided this New York outfit to rarified air modernly reserved for solo artists. Once upon a time rock musicians were on every cover page and the focus of every major interview. Now bands are most often left to marinate and build their own hype in DIY style, needing a handful of albums and a cult fanbase to finally get those major publication phone calls. Geese, however, have broken all the new rules. Too original to ignore, age and genre be damned. The current ‘it’ musicians, talk of the entire industry.
It’s no hyperbole to say Getting Killed is an instant classic. While some listeners may be challenged to find enjoyment in the album’s constant disregard for structure and multitude of twist and turns, there’s no denying how extremely fresh the output is. Geese are far from sounding anything like legends across the pond, Radiohead, but they do feel like a genuine spiritual successor, a band that can push musical boundaries to the satisfaction of critics, cults, and mainstream alike. Geese are content to build a big, weird and ambitious wall of sound and sing around it, and most importantly pull it off to near unanimous satisfaction. Perhaps the shackles that come with the guitar are still too tight and the band are destined for more of a Ween or King Gizzard beloved cult career, but these young guns appear to have all the makings of something special that could one day vault the quartet to superstar status.
Led by Cameron Winter, Geese have everything you could possibly want in a frontman. Oozing charisma, swagger and confidence yet bashful and coy relating to his Gen X peers. His vocal stylings are next level, carried by an impeccable vibrato-falsetto combo paired with annunciation and delivery straight from the early 2000 New York garage rock scene. Think Thom Yorke meets Julian Casablancas. Quite the company to which he adds a powerful lyrical skillset. Keen yet disruptive taking on existential dread, rejecting modernity, and loneliness head on with a forceful pen. An apt depiction of a young face who sees his desires tangled in a mechanism of destruction. There’s temptation and war, claustrophobia and love, but there’s no way to have all the good without the bad. A tortured perception no doubt, but the intelligence of this artist is firmly on display.
Winter’s bandmates are not just hitching a ride either as all are deeply involved in the composition of the musical stylings on Getting Killed, a tireless effort with important construction from all angles. The foursome stay firm in their traditional rock instruments and aptly proceed to weave wood and string elements throughout. But the output is anything but traditional. Songs gallop with ferocity before turning themselves inside out piecing together two or three song ideas in one. The synergetic performance leaves me in awe. The fresh ideas dreamed up are innovative and brought to life in the greatest of ways. Pairing with renouned hip hop producer Kenny Beats, who helped bring IDLES to life, delivers a level of crisp flow to a rock record that can often be missing. A touch that does not go untouched. There’s never a wasted moment, an album where a small concise group of supremely talented individuals had a lofty goal in mind and knew exactly how to achieve it. Psychedelic and artistic, Getting Killed is musical art in its finest form.
Eccentric and blissfully unfazed by traditional boundaries of song structure. Getting Killed is a thought provoking album that explores rare innovative space of artistic musical expression. The Cameron Winter led Geese deliver beauty in relative chaos, rock legends in the making.
Overall Rating: 8.8/10
Favourite Song: Taxes
REID
Before I get going on Geese, I want to take a moment to acknowledge some milestones. Last week’s review of Wednesday’s Bleeds marked Too Sweet Reviews’ 150th written review and we recently passed 130 reels. As we approach our five-year anniversary, I want to thank my dudes Lundi and Roz for their friendship, dedication and passion to get here. This hobby takes a lot of work and I wouldn’t want to do it with anyone else. On to 151.
The power of the Internet is remarkable. Two weeks ago, Lundi wrote this in the group chat:
‘Pitchfork gave an album a 9.0 today’
The album was Getting Killed by New York rock band, Geese. The online buzz surrounding this group has grown exponentially since this message. Reddit forms and X threads. Cillian Murphy interviews, Anne Hathaway instagram posts. I’m not naïve to ignore the impact on my music-dominant algorithm but I think it’s fair to say they’ve quickly gone from a niche group to leaders of Gen Z’s rock renaissance. And by god, they’ve earned it.
Let me start with frontman, Cameron Winter. This guy is a revelation. His unique vocal style serves not only to deliver the lyrics but as a complimentary instrument. His volume, vibrato and falsetto build with the music and amplify each transition. Performing with a guitar or the keyboard as well, he does so with undeniable swagger. Ripping words like this in the titular track, he emanates the air of a rock star.
‘I have been fucking destroyed by the city tonight, I’m getting killed by a pretty good life.’
Speaking of songwriting, Cameron excels at that too. At 23-years young, he is wise beyond his years. These are from 100 Horses.
“General Smith told me
I would never smile again
He said that I would never smile again
But not to worry
For all people, stop smiling
Once they get what they've been begging for
All people
In times of war
Must go down to the circus
General Adams told me
Son, you were born to die scared
So he said, ‘One day you will die scared
But not to worry
For all people must die scared or else die nervous”
The rare inclusion of a lyric wall in a review is held for special occasions and this exceeds expectations. Awesome, insightful stuff from the young man. No further notes.
Emily Green (guitar), Dominic DiGesu (bass) and Max Bassin (drums) join Cameron in bending the limits of the alt rock genre. There’s an embarrassment of riches on the creativity front and Geese accentuate those elements brilliantly with a mixed bag of song structures and quality composition. Songs like Husbands, Islands of Men and Taxes excel at building up, slowly introducing new instruments so you can feel their impact. The titular track feels like three songs in one with the beat switches and those are some lovely melodic guitar sections. On Cobra and Au Pays du Cocaine, you get a softer, bluesy version of the Cameron vocal to go with the catchy chords. The bridge and solo of Bow Down is such a cool direction to end the track. The vocal harmony in Husbands, the mysterious jazzy vibes to Trinidad, the frantic finish to Long Island City Here I Come…the list of standout moments goes on. They cycle through sonic arrangements and it results in effortless flow and forty-six minutes that zips on by.
The revival of rock music to mainstream is seeking a flag bearer and Geese has submitted their candidacy for nomination. Led by a budding superstar in Cameron Winter, Getting Killed is adventure with purpose and a 2025 standout.
Overall Rating: 8.7/10
Favourite Songs: Taxes
ROZ
This week Too Sweet Reviews brings you, the reader, quite the treat. If you’ve made it down this far on our website, then by now you should understand the love this album received from my better thirds. This week’s album is a rarity in the fact that it is not only unanimously held in high regard by the entire TSR trio but also aligned us in a way that dozens upon dozens of albums have failed to do so. The band this week is Geese – a rock band that goes by a rather modest (and dare I say boring) band name, yet who’s sound is anything but. With zero knowledge in the bank and a hunger for new music in my gut, I must admit I feasted spectacularly this week. This is Getting Killed.
What a surprise it was to see that Getting Killed was created in a in collaboration with the band and hip-hop producer Kenny Beats. Kenny Beats is an artist that I’ve followed ever since his EDM days, when he was working under the monikor ‘LOUDPVK’ with LA-based DJ Ryan Marks. Tired from either the touring DJ lifestyle or perhaps losing interest in the genre altogether, Kenny Beats switched to producing records for hip hop artists such as Schoolboy Q and Freddie Gibbs, bigger named pop acts such as Ed Sheeran and FKA twigs, as well as rock acts such as IDLES and – now – Geese. His skills in the studio were certainly put to a rigorous test on Getting Killed, which is an album that seems to flow from one idea to next without much hesitation or remorse. Sonic switch ups happen all the time, as apparent on tracks Getting Killed, Taxes, and Long Island City Here I Come. These abrupt pivots in movement, percussion and tone ensure that the listener loses the ability to get too comfortable or get complacent – you are engaged for its entirety.
On the opening song Trinidad, frontman Cameron Winters swooning, waning vocals juxtapose with its fiery refrain. In another surprising moment, New York based hip hop artist and producer JPEGMAFIA joins Winters in these moments. As a huge Peggy fan, this revelation is a pleasing one. On Cobra, Winters is much more reserved as he’s accompanied by the faint glint of a saloon-type piano and an assortment of lighter instrumentation to fill the rest of the space. Husband seems to march along begrudgingly, with vocal harmonies bellowing out as if the foursome was part of a prison chain gang doing work along the highway. Getting Killed sounds as if it were ripped straight off a Radiohead album and lyrically paints a picture of a man in great pain – a pain even further drawn out by the handfuls of tremolo utilized in Winters performance. As mentioned before, another mid-song switch abruptly brings the track to an idle as Winters loudly proclaims that he’s “getting killed by a pretty good life”. It’s a statement that stuck with me and didn’t let go all throughout the week – I feel most people can relate to self destructive or self-aggrandizing facets of their own life, when relatively speaking, we really should be grateful for having so much in our lives we probably take for granted every single day. Powerful introspection that can only be brought upon by powerful writing.
Cameron Winters is a mesmerizing force; an artist who feels wise well beyond his years. At just the tender age of 23 the man has released four albums with Geese along with his own solo album back in December 2024. The young man has a cadence and timbre that feels like the product of a mad scientist’s lab experiment going horribly right – mixing portions of Thom Yorke and Mick Jagger to create a completely new monster all together. The only thing that can match the impressiveness of his performance across Getting Killed is his songwriting prowess, which for me is some of the best writing I’ve had the honour of experiencing this entire year. Winter unravels the loneliness he feels and the worries and emotions that pass through his body in such a profound way that it starts to feel sort of mind-boggling by the end of the record. Lines such as “I can’t even taste my own tears–they fall into an even sadder bastard’s eyes” and “for all people must die scared or else just die nervous" shoot through the soul like a hot bolt of lightning, thunderously executed with an otherworldly performance to top it all off. When style meets substance in music, you truly get something special – and with Geese, it just feels like they’re playing the game on easy mode.
I’ve got to admit; I found some difficulty when trying to express my feelings and thoughts about this album. Being album number 151 here at Too Sweet Reviews, that says a lot. It might seem cliche to say that an album sounds ‘fresh’ in this modern era of music, but make no mistake – Geese’s ‘Getting Killed’ is exactly that. It’s ambitious, it’s bold, and it’s easily the best rock album of 2025.
Overall Rating: 8.7/10
Favourite Song: Taxes