Getting Killed by Geese

The opening track on Getting Killed, the #2 album of 2025 by Brooklyn band Geese, is set in 13/8 time. You hear Dominic DiGesu’s drawn out bass rhythm, a consistent eight-note tap on the snare by Max Bassin with a two-tap fill between measures, and a four-note Emily Green lead guitar riff, repeating every 13 beats. Two measures in, lead singer Cameron Winter’s supremely drawn out voice, warbly and brokenly singing “I tried / I tried / I tried so hard.” Then the chorus comes crashing in like the kool-aid man, with Winter screaming “THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR” while the band hits a cacophonous rage. The chaos subsides, and the repeating motif that started the song comes back in. “When I went deaf / I used my eye / They stood me in line / ’Til I went blind / Get in let’s driveTHERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR.”

A trombone, a violin, and even experimental hip hop king JPEGMafia shows up somewhere in there. Your instinct is to reject what you’re hearing — this is a mess, it doesn’t work at all, what the hell is going on. It gets your attention, but in confusing, unappealing ways. I’m on edge, cautiously proceeding onto the next song, “Cobra.” It comes in with a jaunty horn, acoustic guitar, and washboard-driven rhythm that’s actually quite pleasant. But then Winter’s voice comes back in, sounding like he’s taking on a drunken Elvis impersonator’s act. “Baby, let me dance away forever” he sings, while the band kicks it up a notch. Winter works up to the chorus, and while he’s no longer screaming, Elvis has been replaced by a lively warble that’s oddly appealing.

The album continues, through a short 46 minutes. The title track, a third of the way in, brings all the elements you heard through the opening songs together, coalescing around Winter’s unique, Dr. John meets Thom Yorke delivery. The album is expertly engineered, with each of the myriad instruments (guitars, bass, drums, cowbell, shaker, tambourine, unrecognizable background vocals) loping, crisp and clear, in a structure that feels held together by one remaining screw that’s about to rattle free. Track nine, “Bow Down,” is a personal favorite, full of the repeating rhythms the band has proven to be very adept at, with a phenomenal end-of-verse chorus: “She said, ‘you don’t know what it’s like’ / To bow down down down to Maria’s dead bones”

Hit play on “Taxes,” featured in the video above. “If you want me to pay my taxes / You’d better come over with a crucifix / You’re gonna have to nail me down.” The chorus on this song, with its beautiful musicianship broken up by Winter’s raspy drone, is uplifting and exciting. And then there’s the ballad “Au Pays du Cocaine,” which could have been a hit on the R&B charts, if the production were a little tighter and if Winter’s pained, gut-wrenching voice were replaced by almost literally any other person who calls themselves a singer. The video is quite amazing, with Winter singing “I’m alright” and sounding anything but to a literal baby before essentially becoming one himself.

I’m aware that this review sounds anything but positive. Therein lies the charm of the album. Parallels to Geese’s sound on Getting Killed can be drawn to bands that I’ve traditionally not been a fan of: Pavement, Beat Happening, The Strokes. I don’t know how to put my finger on what’s changed in me (note those three bands still don’t do it for me), but to my aging ears, Geese sound more alive than anything else has in the past five years. This is rock & roll for the post-COVID era, and I’m so here for it.

Geese have been a going concern since in 2016, when they met in high school, not yet old enough to drive. They released three albums between 2018 and 2023, attempting to find their groove but never landing on my radar. I have not heard those albums. I even saw them live in September, 2024, opening for King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard at the Gorge Amphitheater, but I have no recollection of their set – I just could not be bothered to pay attention.

Then, Winter released a solo album, Heavy Metal, in December 2024¹. The internet attributes this solo turn with opening the door for him and the rest of Geese to find that special thing that led them to the amazing Getting Killed. Heavy Metal is an interesting album – it’s got the simplicity of the humorous Dot by Vulfmon (#13 in 2024), and Winter leans into the quirks of his voice throughout the album, finding a path all his own. There’s also a looseness to the production that feels very much like a precursor to Getting Killed.

2025 was a busy year for Geese, and 2026 doesn’t seem to be providing much respite. Stereogum and The New Yorker both put the album at #1, KEXP listeners voted the album #3. The band played a full live set on producer-to-the-stars Nigel Godrich’s band showcase From the Basement, and just this past weekend (January 24, 2026) Geese performed “Au Pays du Cocaine” and “Trinidad” on Saturday Night Live.

Getting Killed excites me for the future. Cameron Winter is only 23 years old, and the rest of the band can’t be any older. This album may be a turning point for the band, but it’s also a jumping off point for what will likely be a very fruitful musical career. Winter and Geese are driving this train to god knows where, but I know it’s going to be good. Strap in.

^{1. If I were making the list today, Heavy Metal would definitely be included in one-year-removed Top 31 of 2024. But it was released on the 6th of December that year, which I doubt is enough time for it to have grown on me enough to include it when actually pulling together 2024’s Top 31.↩}

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It’s Sorted by Cheekface

I like humor in music. In the Top 31 so far this year we’ve got Father John Misty (over the top crooner), King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard (good ol’ boys), Vulfmon (downright silly), and even yesterday’s artist, MJ Lenderman, is humorous in his own ironic, lyrical way. The band here at #8, LA’s Cheekface, excels at dry, matter-of-fact humor – the exact kind of humor living in today’s uber-politicized world requires.¹ To whit:

I just want to be popular to watch
In the movie you put on from the camera on your porch
Your across-the-street neighbor walks his dog on TV
The future is now, unfortunately
And if I’m never, ever gonna be alone
Here in my community neighborhood home
Then I wanna be popular to watch
In the movie you put on from the camera on your porch

That, dear friends, is the chorus for “Popular 2,” my favorite song from Cheekface’s 4th rockin’ album, It’s Sorted. I can’t describe what a sense of accomplishment I felt when I was able to finally sing that verse word-for-word by memory. It’s so good! Is this musically challenging, ground breaking music? No! Does it make me smile, repeatedly, on every listen? Yes! Do I regularly put exclamation points in my reviews? No! Does Cheekface make me want to use exclamation points? Yes!

I don’t know about you, but I can’t handle a lot of what’s going on in the world right now. Music has the magical power to take you in all kinds of directions: sadness, elation, anger, happiness, emotional, gleeful. Which direction is not necessarily the point, as long as that direction is away from the right now. Cheekface’s magic is that they keep you mostly grounded in the right now, with blunt reality tinged by dry, direct delivery, while still managing to pull you away to some new reality where the absurdity of life is humorous.

The song “Don’t Stop Believing,” very similar to “Indian Summer” by Beat Happening, features the lines “Everyone cool will die. Everyone weird will also die. What lives on is the destruction caused my market economics. Being unique does not fit neatly into the grid of corporate needs. Still, I work like a dog doing a dog day’s work, and who could blame me? I live in a society.” There is nothing funny about those lives. They’re bleak and sad. But lead singer Greg Katz’s baritone delivery is comical. He stumbles over himself trying to cram in the line about working like a dog. It doesn’t fit the beat, but he successfully pulls it off.

The chorus for “Plastic” goes like this: “Everything is gray now, do you like it? You know I only want it if you want it. Whatever you need now, we can make it out of plastic.” These are not song lyrics, this is a letter from a pen pal who’s on the verge of a mental breakdown. The bridge of the same song is a call-and-response with “Is there recycling?” followed by “It’s sorted.” It doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to make me smile.

I first covered Cheekface for their great third album, Too Much to Ask at #22 in 2022. Here we are two years later and that album still sees regular airplay in my home, along with It’s Sorted. “Life in a Bag” (featured in the video above) is one of many highlights across the album. Each song I listen to as I write this review compels me to put the lyrics here in writing – they’re all just so nonsensical but somehow make all the sense in the world. But I’ll stop – just go listen to the damn thing yourself and watch the lyrics as you do.

You can meet the entire band (Greg Katz on lead vocals and guitar, Mandy Tannen on backing vocals and bass, and Mark “Echo” Edwards on drums) by watching the It’s Sorted Album Commentary the band put out in support of the record. One of the more amazing and endearing things about the band is they self-release and self-promote everything they do. The band is very active on social media, their albums come out on Katz’s own New Professor Music record label, and they have toured extensively for the short few years that I’ve known of them.

I saw Cheekface in 2022, missed them last year, but am excited to get to see them again, at Neumos on May 23. Based on the number of “5th album” talk happening in their social posts and on the band’s hosted Discord, I’m confident their next album will be out by then. At the show, there will be lots of singing along, shouting at key moments, likely Katz leading us in some guided dancing, like we are the puppets and he holds the strings. Cheekface shows are very interactive. And the best part? I am very confident that my cheeks will hurt from smiling by the end of the show. Maybe that’s why they call themselves Cheekface.

^{1. Wikipedia take all the fun out of describing the fun that is Cheekface: “The group's songs, characterized by [lead singer Greg] Katz’s talk-singing, are typically short and lyrics-driven with a dry sense of humor and tend to share a thematic interest in anxiety and sociopolitical unease.” ↩}

#2 on the 2025 Bacon Top 31 — Geese

#8 on the 2024 Bacon Top 31 — Cheekface