Taxes

There is an old joke, credited to Benjamin Franklin, that only two things in life are certain: death and taxes. Geese's song borrows the second half of that line and strips it of anything resembling an April deadline. The debt collected here isn't owed to a government. It's owed to a conscience, to the people we've wronged, and to the parts of ourselves we've spent years avoiding, and eventually, inevitably, the bill comes due.

A Fourth Album, A Different Band

Geese came up as a group of Brooklyn friends who started playing together in high school, and by the time "Taxes" arrived, the band had already lived through a fairly compressed version of the indie-rock hype cycle. Getting Killed is their fourth full-length, and the first they made as a quartet following guitarist Foster Hudson's departure in 2023^[4]. That lineup change hangs over the record without ever being addressed directly, part of a broader sense that the band making this album is not quite the same band that made the earlier ones, and that some of what "Taxes" is settling accounts with may be internal to the group itself as much as it is romantic or civic.

Ten Days in a Burning City

Geese wrote and recorded "Taxes" during a single ten-day stretch in January 2025 at Putnam Hill, the Los Angeles studio belonging to producer Kenny Beats^[1], a hip-hop producer the Brooklyn band chose specifically because he had no stake in the indie-rock traditions they were trying to escape^[4]. The band worked fourteen-hour days, arriving with roughly twenty unfinished demos that got rebuilt, sometimes from scratch, in real time, often growing out of half-hour jam sessions locked onto a single groove^[4]. The Southern California wildfires were burning through the region during those sessions, filling the air outside the studio with smoke, a literal backdrop to an album Cameron Winter later described as feeling like a waking nightmare until it was finally mastered^[4].

"Taxes" arrived as the lead single on July 8, 2025^[1][3], almost three months ahead of the album Getting Killed, which followed on September 26, 2025 on Partisan Records and PIAS^[4]. The band had actually debuted the song live more than a year earlier, opening for King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard in Boston in August 2024, which means its shape was worked out on stages well before it was worked out in a studio^[3]. By October 2025 it was being performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live, evidence of how quickly the song had moved from tour opener to centerpiece^[3].

What the Song Is Actually Taxing

The central trick of "Taxes" is refusing to be about money for even a moment. Critics have described its central metaphor as a stand-in for the debts we accrue and then avoid paying: apologies we never get around to making, truths we'd rather not hear, a reckoning we file away and keep postponing^[3]. Framed against the old Franklin cliche about death and taxes, the song reads less like a complaint about the IRS and more like an acknowledgment that cruelty and disappointment are simply part of the cost of being in relation to other people^[2]. Some readings push this further into the intimate register, framing the title obligation as a kind of levy on any long-term commitment, the emotional interest that accrues the longer two people stay entangled^[2].

That ambiguity is deliberate. Winter's lyricism throughout Getting Killed leans on dense, allusive imagery rather than direct statement^[4], and "Taxes" is often singled out for the way it fuses tender, almost pleading address with anachronistic and biblical language, turning a mundane bureaucratic word into something that can hold guilt, power, and obligation all at once^[1].

Part of what makes that fusion work is how comfortably the song reaches for religious vocabulary without ever settling into actual belief. Images of damnation, sacrifice, and a body offered up for judgment run through the lyric, not as statements of faith but as borrowed language for guilt that otherwise has no adequate vocabulary^[1]. It is the vocabulary of someone who grew up around these symbols, no longer takes them literally, and reaches for them anyway because nothing secular hits quite as hard when describing the feeling of being owed, or owing, something unpayable.

Confession as a Form of Self-Government

One of the more compelling readings of "Taxes" argues that the song's real subject is accountability, not grievance. Rather than cataloguing what other people have taken, the song pivots toward what the narrator owes and has failed to give, shifting from blaming outward to examining inward^[6]. That essay traces the idea back through Emerson and Thoreau, to a tradition that locates moral clarity in individual conscience rather than in whatever a crowd happens to agree is good or evil^[6]. It's a reading that fits the song's climax, where Winter arrives at a resigned kind of self-punishment, choosing to be the one who breaks his own heart rather than waiting for the world to do it to him. It plays less like despair than like a strange grab for agency, the one lever of control left to a person who cannot control anything else being asked of him^[2].

A Crowd That Turns on Itself

Director Noel Paul's music video makes the song's undercurrent of dread literal. It opens as handheld, almost amateur concert footage before accelerating into undercranked, fever-dream imagery of an audience descending into violence and cannibalism, an explicit nod to Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son^[1]. The band keeps playing through all of it, seemingly unmoved, while the crowd consumes itself in front of them, a literalization of the fear of being surpassed, replaced, or simply used up by the people watching^[6].

That image lands differently once you know what Geese themselves were navigating around the same time. The band's rapid rise brought scrutiny that went beyond typical music criticism, including claims that their fanbase had been manufactured, which the band addressed head-on rather than ignoring^[5]. Winter has said the group is skeptical of nearly all outside opinion, positive or negative, and that a Saturday Night Live appearance which should have felt like a triumph instead left him deflated^[5]. Seen alongside that context, the taxation metaphor stretches naturally to cover what an audience and an industry now extract from a young band: attention, authenticity, a continuous performance of gratitude for opportunities that also cost something real.

Built to Detonate

The arrangement mirrors the content. "Taxes" opens on a polyrhythmic pulse that eventually gives way to wide, chiming guitar lines, a structure that lets the song feel like it is accumulating pressure before it finally lets go^[4]. Winter's vocal delivery moves between a stream-of-consciousness murmur and a strained, almost desperate outburst, blending qualities of emo and folk songwriting inside a track that otherwise thrashes with rock intensity^[3]. That combination of restraint and eruption is a large part of why the song resonated so widely by the end of 2025: NME placed it at number two on its list of the year's fifty best songs^[7], while Pitchfork ranked it tenth on its own year-end list, praising the way it built tension on hollow, rattling drums before exploding into an almost euphoric pop melody^[8].

Reading It More Than One Way

Part of why "Taxes" has stayed in circulation, cited on year-end lists and picked apart in essays, is that no single reading of it fully cancels out the others. It can be heard as a meditation on human cruelty in general, or narrowed to the specific toll of a long relationship^[2]. It can be read as a philosophical argument for private conscience over public judgment^[6], or as something plainer and sadder: a song about apologies left undelivered and a closure someone keeps putting off^[3]. None of these interpretations require dismissing the others. The song's imagery is broad enough, and vague enough about its actual subject, to hold all of them at once, which is very likely the reason it survives repeat listening instead of exhausting itself after the first.

Why It Landed

A song about a boring bureaucratic obligation becoming one of the most acclaimed tracks of 2025^[7][8] says something about the moment it arrived in. "Taxes" names a feeling a lot of people carry without having language for it: that adulthood functions as one long, unpaid invoice of things owed to other people and to ourselves, and that the collector eventually shows up whether or not anyone feels ready. Geese wrapped that feeling in a song built to detonate, and audiences recognized the debt immediately.

That recognition extended well past the single. Getting Killed as a whole was received with something close to universal acclaim, scoring 89 out of 100 on Metacritic, with both The New Yorker and Stereogum naming it among the best albums of the year^[4]. "Taxes" is the song most often singled out as the album's thesis statement in miniature: a band working through what it means to keep functioning, keep touring, and keep writing, while something inside quietly keeps a ledger of everything that hasn't been settled. Franklin's old joke about death and taxes never mentioned interest, but Geese seem to understand that unpaid debts of the emotional kind always accrue it.