Geese Is A Great American BAND

Also: David Blue, Joanne Robertson and (mother-effing) "One Battle After Another"

Geese put out my favorite album of 2025 this week. It’s called Getting Killed, and I wrote a long review of it for Uproxx. I understand the danger of making a declarative statement like “this is my favorite album of the year” when there’s still 100 or so days left to go. But I just have a feeling about this one, similar to what I felt for Manning Fireworks last year. Sometimes, an all-timer just declares itself. And Getting Killed is an all-timer.

Here’s a sample of what I wrote:

Music critics like to do this thing where they point to an album or a song and declare, “This music captures how it feels to live in America right now.” And, often, I make fun of this. And you probably do, too. It just sounds so foolish and pompous. Because it’s almost never literally true. Art that aspires to capture “how it feels to live in America right now,” 99 percent of the time, is terrible. If it happens, it’s only by accident, which paradoxically undermines the allegedly definitive nature of the enterprise. Either way, most arguments about a particular piece of music capturing the national mood are rooted in faulty premises. Worse, it’s pretentious “music critic stuff,” ripe for derision.

Having said that: I have a song that captures how it feels to live in America right now.

It’s called “Trinidad,” and it’s the first track on the new Geese album, Getting Killed. You might already know it — Getting Killed is among the year’s most anticipated indie-rock records, and “Trinidad” was the second single, released about two months before the arrival of the LP this week. Though it’s hardly an obvious choice for a single. It is, rather, a confounding sonic blob, a bad acid trip that sounds like a late-’90s Phish improv plucked from the middle of “You Enjoy Myself.” In the chorus — if it can be called a chorus — singer Cameron Winter screams, “There’s a bomb in my car!” And the music makes you believe him. The swirl of sounds, the bleeps and bloops and thunder and crashes, replicate the slow-motion sensation of spinning out in a cataclysmic auto wreck. That feeling where your body hasn’t quite yet been annihilated but is keenly aware that total devastation is coming. A familiar premonition these days, to be sure.

“My son is in bed / my daughters are dead,” Winter intones. “My wife’s in the shed / My husband’s burning lead.” The details are so extreme and terrifying that it morphs into comedy as dark as a shark’s eyes. This can’t possibly be happening, you think when “Trinidad” is on. Though you were already thinking that, because — here it comes — that’s how it feels to live in America right now. “Trinidad,” like our unreal reality, is ridiculous and horrific, numbly stoned and violently kneejerk, and on the verge of certain collapse even as it spins destructively forward.

After listening to Getting Killed for the past few months, I have no doubt that it is the greatest album of 2025. But I am even more confident that is the most 2025 album of 2025, the record that, by far, best captures how scary and chaotic things seem right now, in this age of smart robots and dumb authoritarians and passionately litigated talk-show controversies and memory-holed sex-trafficking conspiracies. Getting Killed nailed that “tragicomic horror show” vibe from the moment the video for “Taxes” dropped, when Geese depicted themselves playing for an audience of unhinged freaks who rip each other apart as the music hits an exhilarating peak.

That was back in July. At the start of fall, we are currently in full-on self-immolation mode. Threats, invective, limbs, bullets — they’re all choking the air like vultures. And now, finally, the appropriate soundtrack for the madness has arrived.

At the end of the essay, I make a point of declaring Geese’s greatness as a band. This was important to me for two reasons. One, a lot of the attention being given to Geese right now is inspired by Heavy Metal, the solo album put out by frontman Cameron Winter last December. And it’s warranted, especially since the album was deliberately dumped during the absolute worst time to put out new music in terms of garnering media attention, that period when critics are either compiling their year-end lists or powering down before the holidays. 2025 has been one long makeup call for the silence that greeted Heavy Metal for the first month or so of its release.

I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that writers and fans initially were drawn to Heavy Metal (rather than Geese’s equally excellent 2023 release 3D Country) because it was credited to one person. Because music culture right now simply is not oriented toward glorifying groups. As I wrote in the column:

I don’t just mean rock groups. Think back to the 1990s and recall how groups once also dominated pop, R&B, hip-hop, and country. Groups still exist, obviously, but they don’t capture the zeitgeist anymore. And that’s our fault as much as theirs. As we, the listeners, have retreated from communal spaces to tech-aided isolation, so have our musicians. Solo artists are simply more “relatable” now, as conduits that reflect our own limited IRL social circles and suspicion of outsiders. After all, how many of us ever stand in a pack of three or four people out in public anymore?

That’s why, to me, Geese is so refreshing. There are, I argue, “the rarest of beasts: A great, young American band. Not a side project for yet another popular singer-songwriter with undeniable parasocial appeal, but a working unit where the members become something greater than their individual selves.”

The second reason this was on my mind is that I recently turned in my book about The Strokes to my publisher, and a big theme of that book is the power of bands and why their prominence has been deluded over the years. Like Geese, The Strokes are dominated by their lead singer and songwriter, Julian Casablancas (who also sounds a bit like Winter). But the reason The Strokes briefly captured the public’s attention in the early aughts is how they embodied the iconography of an archetypal, fivepiece rock band, where you have the singer in the middle, his Keith Richards-like sidekick to his left, the Izzy Stradlin-looking guy to the right, then the stoic bass player and then the floppy-haired drummer. The Strokes didn’t always operate like a one-for-all, all-for-one band, but they looked like one at all times. And there’s something very romantic about that, at least for people like me who get romantic about things like rock bands. And Geese pushes a lot of those buttons for me, and maybe for you, too.

FURTHER LISTENING

Over on my podcast Never Ending Stories, we posted a marathon three-and-a-half hour episode on Blonde On Blonde, a Bob Dylan LP of some repute, as you might be aware. A chunk of that time was taken up by me talking about David Blue, a Dylan associate who’s been mostly forgotten since his death in 1981. (He died while jogging, possibly the least rock ‘n’ roll death imaginable.) Blue was tall and good-looking, and had lots of famous friends. After getting his start with Dylan in the Greenwich Village folk scene, he relocated to California and linked up with the royalty of ’70s singer-songwriterdom — Jackson Browne was a friend, Joni Mitchell literally paid his rent for a spell, The Eagles covered him on the Desperado album, and David Geffen tirelessly tried to make him a star. No dice. Later, he revived his acting aspirations and appeared in Wim Wenders’ The American Friend and Neil Young’s insane Human Highway. Then he took that last, fateful run through Washington Square Park.

As a musician, his body of work is good, not great. I wish I could make a case for him being a lost genius, but I think it’s clear why he never made it. (In this instance, being in the vicinity of so many talented songwriters probably hurt him in the long run, as it emphasized the relative weakness of his own compositions.) I do, however, enjoy listening to his albums; he has what my friend Jake Longstreth calls a “tasteful palate,” in that his music always sounds like better music. That’s especially true of his 1966 self-titled debut, released three months after Blonde On Blonde, which is one of my favorite all-time Bob Dylan rip-off records.

RECOMMENDATION CORNER

This is primarily a music newsletter, but I want to take a moment to write briefly about One Battle After Another, the astounding new Paul Thomas Anderson film out this week. Honestly, this movie being paired with Getting Killed made September 26 feel like a personal holiday. They’re both bolt acts of extreme artistic virtuosity that feel like responses to the moment we live in, while also being way more fun and exhilarating than “responses to the moment we live in” tend to be.

I might actually write more about OBAA once I see it a second time, which I plan on doing soon, hopefully in the next few days. But for now, I’m just reflecting on how my relationship with PTA’s work is closer to that of a beloved band than a film director. He’s among the small handful of artists I have stayed with for the majority of my life. I saw Hard Eight in college, either on video or at the campus theater, mainly because I liked Tarantino and Samuel L. Jackson was in it. I loved it, and read excitedly about his next movie, Boogie Nights, which would become one of the singular movie-theater experiences of my life. Then it was Magnolia, which I saw three times in the theater and felt at least three different ways about. I couldn’t see Punch-drunk Love in a theater, because it didn’t play in the small town I was living in at the time. But There Will Be Blood was another event I was there to see on opening night, and it topped even Boogie Nights. I saw The Master immediately after my son was born and my sleep-deprived mind was shredded. And then it was Inherent Vice, which I dug so much I bought the movie poster and hung it in my office. I liked Licorice Pizza slightly less, but still saw it twice in a theater.

Based on one viewing, my main takeaway is that One Battle After Another falls somewhere between the third best PTA and the sixth best. The top two, There Will Be Blood and Boogie Nights, are just too entrenched in my life to ever be topped. Then again, I could be right back here contradicting myself after I finally see OBAA in IMAX.

September has been an incredible month for music. Getting Killed and Wednesday’s Bleeds are the headliners for me, but Joanne Robertson isn’t far behind. This British singer-songwriter hits the sweet spot between wistful folk and evocative dream pop. Her latest album Blurr is aptly named — Robertson sounds like she’s playing and softly singing from the bottom of a deep well. It’s all echo, longing, and profound beauty, an ideal record for autumn.