Getting Killed

The Beautiful Trap

There is a specific type of suffering that does not look like suffering from the outside. You have enough. You have more than enough. And yet something keeps grinding you down, slowly and imperceptibly, until you realize the comfort itself is what is killing you. This is the central insight of Getting Killed, the fourth album from Brooklyn art-rock band Geese, released September 26, 2025.^[1]

The title track announces the album's thesis with disarming candor: the narrator is being destroyed, not by hardship but by something closer to adequacy, a life that offers just enough to make genuine grievance feel absurd. It is a joke and a confession at the same time, which is exactly the register the album operates in throughout.^[2]

Geese recorded the album over ten intensive days at Putnam Hill Studio in Los Angeles in January 2025, working alongside producer Kenny Beats, best known for his work in hip-hop.^[1] The choice was deliberate: frontman Cameron Winter and the band wanted a collaborator who was not already steeped in the indie-rock traditions they were working against. The result is a record that sounds both tightly coiled and ready to fly apart at any moment, propelled by a rhythm section that Beats pushed toward maximum expressiveness.^[3]

A World on Fire (Literally and Figuratively)

The timing of the recording carried its own symbolic weight. The sessions took place during the devastating Southern California wildfires, an environmental catastrophe unfolding just outside the studio.^[1] That backdrop seeps into the album's atmosphere without ever becoming a subject in itself. Getting Killed captures the feeling of making art while the world burns, of carrying on with music and jokes and ambition while catastrophe accumulates just out of frame.

This is not a protest record. But it is keenly attentive to the texture of political anxiety. "100 Horses," widely identified as the album's emotional climax, invokes the ancient relationship between spectacle and power, drawing connections between wartime distraction and the contemporary media circus.^[4] The song does not offer a solution. It offers a mirror, reflecting back the sense of helplessness that comes from watching atrocities while the machinery of entertainment grinds on.

The album's political awareness never tips into polemic, partly because Geese seem more interested in the feeling of powerlessness than in assigning blame. Songs like "Taxes" use the mundane mechanics of civic obligation as a metaphor for something closer to martyrdom: the emotional toll extracted by institutions, relationships, and systems that demand compliance but offer nothing sacred in return.^[5] Critics noted the layered critique embedded in the song's imagery, from healthcare to foreign policy to the fundamental question of what we owe each other.^[6]

God and the Circus

Religious imagery runs through Getting Killed like a fault line. Angels and serpents, crucifixions and falls from grace, the horses of the apocalypse and the preserved relics of saints appear throughout the lyrics, not as expressions of faith exactly, but as inherited frameworks for making sense of inexplicable suffering.^[7]

Geese are children of an age raised on these symbols but unable to take them literally. The biblical vocabulary is deployed not to invoke certainty but to underscore its absence. The opening track, "Trinidad," pairs jazz trumpet and noise-rock explosions with imagery of detonation, suggesting a world where the bomb is always present, always ticking, and everyone has simply agreed to look elsewhere.^[8] Cameron Winter and JPEGMafia trade vocals on this track, and their double voice carries its own suggestion: that this sense of impending crisis is not the property of one genre or subculture but a shared condition.^[1]

The closing track, "Long Island City Here I Come," layers references to Joan of Arc, the warrior-saint condemned by the institution she served, against the coordinates of a specific New York City neighborhood.^[4] The juxtaposition is simultaneously funny and devastating. Grand mythological sacrifice arrives at a very particular, very mundane destination.

The Noise of Everything

One of the album's recurring preoccupations is the difficulty of hearing yourself think in a world that never stops talking. Getting Killed was made in the shadow of a specific cultural moment: an information environment so dense and so loud that individual consciousness struggles to find purchase. Winter's lyrics repeatedly circle back to this condition, to the experience of trying to articulate something true while the entire world shouts at the same volume.^[6]

This is why the album's humor matters as much as its anguish. Geese process the overwhelm through a kind of absurdism that refuses to let the listener settle into simple despair. Winter's lyrics have been compared to verbal Rorschach blots,^[7] images that mean something different depending on what the listener brings to them. The band uses obliquity not as evasion but as invitation: the songs create space for the listener's own catastrophe to slot in alongside the narrator's.

That obliquity is also the source of the album's remarkable replay value. Getting Killed does not yield all of itself on a first listen. The imagery accumulates, the jokes reveal their second meanings, the grooves open up into unexpected dimensions.^[9]

Loneliness and the City

Several songs on the album meditate on isolation in ways that feel specific to the contemporary urban experience. "Husbands" builds slowly from a spare, metronomic foundation, its narrator wrestling with loneliness as something more than mere aloneness: a familiar companion that has overstayed its welcome, something so integrated into daily life that its absence would require a complete reconstruction of the self.^[10]

"Islands of Men" extends this inquiry across a longer form, a six-minute meditation on collective retreat from reality, on communities that have organized themselves around shared refusal rather than shared aspiration.^[8] The song asks, gently but insistently, whether the listener has made their peace with sinking.

New York City, where Geese formed and continue to live, functions as the album's implicit setting and its organizing tension. The city is both impossibly expensive and impossibly magnetic, a machine for generating alienation that people keep feeding themselves into because the alternative is not to be in New York.^[6] "Long Island City Here I Come" articulates this bind with a kind of resigned bravado, heading back to the city not because it promises salvation but because that is where you go when you have run out of other ideas.

The Shape of a Generation

Pitchfork awarded Getting Killed a 9.0 and Best New Music designation, calling it the band's strangest and strongest work.^[2] Consequence of Sound gave it a perfect score, naming it one of the most creative indie rock records of the 2020s.^[4] The New Yorker and Stereogum both placed it at the top of their year-end lists.^[7] This level of critical consensus is unusual for a band still in its mid-twenties, and it points to something beyond mere craft.

Geese have made an album that speaks directly to the condition of being young and conscious and overwhelmed in a historical moment that offers no clean resolutions. The music is not comfortable. It is abrasive and funny and grief-stricken and irreverent, often at the same moment. But it validates something that a lot of contemporary life refuses to validate: the feeling that being reasonably okay and still falling apart is a genuine contradiction worth taking seriously.^[11]

The album was produced by Kenny Beats, whose hip-hop sensibility helped Geese escape their own reference points.^[3] The result borrows from jazz, no-wave, funk, and art rock without belonging fully to any of them, a hybrid music for an audience that has been raised on everything at once and still cannot find the frequency it needs.^[12]

Getting Killed does not promise that the condition gets better. But it maps the terrain with unusual precision, which is its own kind of relief. The last sound on the record is a band heading somewhere anyway, which may be all any of us can manage.