Geese’s new release “Getting Killed” has been met with essentially unanimous praise, and for good reason. The band has been around since their 2021 debut album, and, relatively speaking, have stayed close to their roots: funky rock with a chamber orchestra thrown in when deemed necessary. That’s not to say that their albums — “Projector,” released in 2021, and “3D Country,” released in 2023 — thus far have been monotonous, quite the contrary. Their fundamental sound stays the same, to be sure, but with each new release the band reaches through time and space for inspiration — whether from ’90s math rock, ’80s post-punk or — on their most recent album, a delightful mixture of bluesy krautrock and psychedelia hailing from the ’70s. On “Getting Killed,” we see Geese collaborate on production with Kenny Beats, which seems to have given us a sound familiar and foreign alike: The chaotic rock of their previous album, “3D Country”  is there, but a tinge of melancholy seems to lightly cover the album, softening wailing guitars and angular drumming into something more powerful and more human than we’ve seen from Geese before. 

The album opens with a nightmare: “Trinidad,” with a hidden JPEGMAFIA feature, tells the story of a family broken apart by a coldly unforgiving and cyclical society that brings nothing but eternal numbness and exhaustion to all its members. Geese has never been the kind of band to use linear lyricism, but on “Trinidad” this fact is especially apparent: The chorus consists of nothing but a wailing scream of “There’s a bomb in my car!” backed by heavy drums and a singular grungy guitar chord that weighs the song down in between the fairly light instrumentation of the verses. The vocal delivery of the band’s frontman, Cameron Winters, elevates this track into a truly unsettling piece that evokes  a feeling that’s only bolstered by the absurdity of the lyrics. They seem to hint at a narrative much larger than what we, the audience, are granted to know. This nonlinear method of songwriting is a marker of the album. One could argue, of course, that it brings nothing but confusion to the listener. I would argue that this choice makes sense in light of the lyricism that seems to embrace the existential dread that has become so common to younger generations — a sentiment that “Getting Killed” embraces with open arms. 

This last point is especially salient on the third track on the album, “Husbands,” which explores loneliness as a contradictory concept: loneliness as a familiar, almost welcomed feeling and loneliness as an emotion that needs to to be substituted for and healed by other emotions and experiences. “Oh, this horse on my back / gives me all that I need.” This sensibility is most aptly summarized in the opening lyrics to the bridge: “And if my loneliness should stay / well, some are holiest that way.” Some wounds, Geese proposes, can ease the pain of others. The song’s production is fairly simple: a plucked electric guitar backed by some drums and essentially nothing else, allowing the song’s ruminations on our ideas of loneliness to take front and center. 

Though “Husbands” introduces the emotions that “Getting Killed” will spend its entire tracklist returning to in one way or another, the album’s title track is similarly — if not more so — indicative of the album’s ethos. The fourth track on “Getting Killed” focuses on suffering on a more global level — how significant is your sadness, Winters wonders, when your neighbor is in even more anguish than you, and when their neighbor in turn has more to weep for than both of you combined? How can one live in a society that grants distractions from horrors across the world when all the comforts we are offered are temporary? We, as Winters declares, are getting killed by a pretty good life, a life that grants us pleasure at the cost of something far more important: the loss of our individual agency and control in a world that is becoming ever more commercialized and complex. The production of “Getting Killed’s” title track, unsurprisingly, reflects the song’s sentiment: Disembodied voices yell on a loop that stops and resumes during every other verse, bombarding the listener with stimulation that crescendos and crescendos until it all of a sudden stops. 

The fifth and sixth tracks on the album — “Islands of Men” and “100 Horses” — center around the idea of loneliness that has been so prevalent on the album so far, but specifically in relation to one’s identity. “Islands of Men” presents a rumination on where you can find meaning: in others (islands of men), or in yourself (man is an island). “100 Horses” revolves around these ideas but instead in relation to an all-governing political body. Officers in positions of political power appear throughout the song — “General Smith told me / I would never smile again,” — and dole out orders to smile and dance through a war even as destruction and death rain down. The angular drumming, lightly plucked acoustic guitar and funky chords of an electric guitar behind the vocals makes for a disconcerting experience: One isn’t sure if they should dance or furrow their brow for the entirety of the song’s length. When it comes to Geese, let’s be honest, this is probably the goal. 

“Au Pays du Cocaine” focuses on bargaining for love in terms of impossibilities. Backed by a sweetly plucked harp and guitar — almost harkening back to a Beatles-era ballad — Geese twists a love song into an ode of desperation for the one you love even as they can’t love you back, using the imagery of a sailor in green — green being an unlucky color for sailors — to illustrate the hopelessness of the situation. With this in mind, the lyricism focuses less on abstract imagery and more on childlike pleas: “Baby you can change, and still choose me.” The next song on the album, “Bow Down,” returns to the imagery of the sailor, with the subject of the song now being the boat steering the sailor, rather than the other way around. In other words, we return to the theme of agency that much of the album has ruminated on. 

Though the majority of “Getting Killed” seems almost nihilistic in nature — from the existentialism of “Husbands” to the heartache of “Au Pays du Cocaine,” the last two tracks of the album offer hope at the end of a long journey. “Taxes” has the subject of the song — and album — recognizing their complicity and victimhood as it relates to corrupt society, ending with the subject finally laying claim to their agency — refusing to pay taxes, as it were. The first half of the song features a fairly minimal instrumental background until it reaches the end of the second verse, when the song’s mood abruptly shifts from solemn to joyous. This mood continues into the last song, “Long Island City Here I Come” — an incredibly lyric-dense and instrumentally chaotic song that grandly finishes with the proclamation, “here I come.” Winters references Joan of Arc, Buddy Holly and Charlemagne on his journey to self-actualization: “Nobody knows where they’re going except for me.” 

“Getting Killed’s” album cover is a wonderful representation of this album’s sound: beautiful and disarming; simple, yet meaningful. The majority of the album is spent focusing on fairly depressing themes: existential dread, unrequited love, loneliness, etc., but “Getting Killed” is fundamentally a hopeful album. Each song begins anew as a continuation of the last, building and building until the subject’s only preoccupation is not their loneliness, not their lack of agency, not their sadness — but their future. We leave Geese on a journey towards a better future after spending so much time in an unfulfilling present. I’m sure we too will follow suit.