Crusades

Picture someone raising their arms toward the ceiling of a room, not in surrender but in claim, as though the gesture alone could summon a god into the room and a better version of themselves along with it. That is the posture Geese strike on "Crusades," a song that lasts barely two and a half minutes and somehow manages to swing from swagger to breakdown and back before it is over.

It is one of the strangest, most compressed moments on 3D Country, the 2023 album that reinvented the Brooklyn band as something much harder to categorize than the post-punk group critics had pegged them as.^[1], and it uses the language of religious conviction to describe something closer to a person trying to armor themselves against their own uncertainty.

A Band Shedding Its Old Skin

"Crusades" arrived as track six on 3D Country, released on June 23, 2023, the first Geese record made with an outside producer, James Ford, and the first time the band had access to a string section and guest backing vocalists in the studio.^[1] The whole album was built loosely around an invented character: an uptight cowboy who wanders the desert on psychedelics and watches his sense of self come apart.^[1] That premise gave the band a frame for songs about collapse, tenderness, and the myths people build to hold themselves together, and "Crusades" reads like one of the record's clearest statements of that collapse in miniature.

The record marked a deliberate break from the sound that had made Geese's name. The band has said they set out to make something that could not simply be filed under post-punk, folding in classic rock, gospel, and Americana textures alongside the jagged rhythms of their earlier work.^[3] That pivot happened at a genuinely precarious moment for the band. Before Partisan Records and Play It Again Sam came calling, every member of Geese had already been accepted to college, and the offer arrived, as the band has described it, at nearly the last possible moment a different path could have been chosen.^[3] A record built around a character losing his grip on identity was written by a band that had only barely avoided losing its own.

Part of what steadied them through that uncertainty was a long-running mentorship. An after-school instructor who had worked with the band since some of its members were around ten years old stepped in to help guide them through label interest once it finally arrived, a steadying presence during a period when a handful of teenagers were suddenly fielding real offers from record companies.^[3] That combination of youthful precarity and outside mentorship helps explain why 3D Country sounds like a band testing the limits of what it was allowed to become, rather than one coasting on a formula that had already worked.

Faith as Armor

Strip away the song's title and its opening bravado, and "Crusades" is really about what happens when a person tries to use conviction the way a soldier uses armor: as a shield against the vulnerability of simply being a person with no certainty about anything. The narrator does not describe faith as comfort. He describes it as a costume of hardness draped over something soft and exposed underneath.^[2]

That armor image only makes sense alongside the song's other central idea, which is a kind of directional despair: the sense of having lost whatever compass used to point toward right and wrong, and grabbing for religious language because it is the only vocabulary left that promises a direction at all.^[2] The narrator is not so much finding God as reaching for the idea of God the way a person reaches for a railing in the dark, less out of belief than out of a need for something, anything, to hold.

Musically, the track mirrors that instability rather than resolving it. Jagged instrumentation and sudden shifts in Cameron Winter's vocal delivery track the narrator's swings between certainty and panic, so that the song never settles into the steady, hymn-like calm its subject matter might suggest.^[2]

The Performance of Devotion

The song's emotional arc moves in a fairly clear shape: it opens on something like defiant swagger, slides into a quieter kind of desperation, escalates into something approaching mania, and finally settles into a hollowed-out acceptance that undercuts all the certainty that came before it.^[2] What makes that arc land is the suggestion that the narrator only feels substantial while he is performing belief. Left alone, without the pose of righteousness to fill him out, he is empty. The crusade is not really about a cause outside himself; it is a way of generating a self to inhabit.^[2]

That reading fits neatly with how Winter has talked about his own approach to lyrics and performance around this era of the band. He has said that the words themselves matter less than whether the person singing them genuinely means them in the moment, and that he actively avoids anything that reads as phony or calculated.^[4] During the making of 3D Country, he has described trying to be as expressive as possible and letting each song find its own emotional register rather than imposing one from outside.^[4] Applied to "Crusades," that philosophy suggests the song is less interested in litigating theology than in capturing the physical, vocal sensation of a person talking himself into belief in real time, whether or not it holds.

Cynical Americana for an Anxious Age

"Crusades" does not exist in isolation. It is one thread in an album widely read as a satirical, unsettled take on American mythology, arriving at a moment of broader climate and cultural anxiety, with critics describing the record as more interested in burying nostalgia than praising it.^[6] Reviewers grouped Geese alongside a wider wave of restless, theatrical art-punk bands willing to swing between chaos and melodrama within a single song, which is exactly the territory "Crusades" occupies in under three minutes.^[6]

One reading of the album's cowboy figure describes him ascending from a familiar country-music cliché into something closer to a holy fool, a character capable of finding flashes of joy even while staring directly at a bleak, apocalyptic version of the world, with the band pairing genuinely melancholy lyrics against music that is almost satirically bombastic.^[5] "Crusades" plays like one more costume this figure tries on mid-collapse: religious zeal borrowed not out of devotion but out of sheer need for a role to perform, a way to keep moving forward when the ground underneath him has already given way.

Mania or Salvation: Two Ways to Hear It

There is a darker way to hear "Crusades," and a more forgiving one, and the song leaves room for both. The darker reading treats the narrator's fervor as a warning sign, watching faith curdle into mania as he tries to outrun his own sense of insignificance, using religious intensity the way another person might use any other compulsive behavior: to drown out the silence underneath.^[2]

But the same song supports a gentler interpretation, one where the crusade in question is not really religious at all but creative. Under this reading, the narrator's desperate conviction stands in for the act of making art itself, treated as a lifeline when every other belief system has already failed him, which reframes the song's mania as a legitimate way of coping rather than a purely destructive spiral.^[2] Given how openly Winter has discussed needing to feel a song rather than intellectualize it, and how instinctively he says he writes, away from home and rarely by sitting down and trying on purpose,^[4] it is easy to hear "Crusades" as being at least partly about songwriting itself: the strange, half-mad conviction it takes to keep believing a song is worth finishing.

Why It Still Lands

Part of what makes "Crusades" effective is its refusal to overstay its welcome. The song does not build a slow, deliberate case for its narrator's spiritual crisis; it detonates it in under three minutes and moves on, mirroring the way real conviction often works, burning hot and fast before it either hardens into something durable or burns itself out entirely.

That brevity is also what keeps the song from tipping into parody. Geese let the narrator's fervor sound genuinely thrilling for a few seconds before pulling the floor out from under it, which is a much harder trick than either straightforward reverence or straightforward mockery would have been. The song respects how good it can feel to believe something completely, even while it quietly interrogates why a person might need to believe that hard in the first place.

That tension between armor and vulnerability, performance and genuine feeling, is exactly what makes "Crusades" resonate beyond its runtime. Almost everyone has, at some point, grabbed onto an idea, an identity, or a belief with a white-knuckled grip simply to keep from feeling like they were in free fall. Geese wrapped that recognizable panic into a desert cowboy's borrowed religious language, gave it two minutes and thirty-eight seconds to live, and then moved on to the next character and the next collapse, a restlessness that would go on to define the band's work well beyond 3D Country.