Geese

Geese are not a band that announces itself. They crept up on people. One angular, post-punk-adjacent record in 2022, a couple of years of touring, and then Getting Killed dropped last year and suddenly everyone from Pitchfork to Courtney Love was paying attention.

That last detail is not a throwaway. Love has been publicly enthusiastic about the band, calling frontman Cameron Winter “a seriously good lyricist” and describing the sound as “Daniel Johnston meets Rolling Stones.” She went to see them live while they were touring the UK. When someone with Love’s specific musical history starts posting Instagram videos about a band, it says something about the band.

Geese are from Brooklyn, though their music does not sound particularly local in the way that some New York bands do. Winter’s voice is a strange instrument, the kind of delivery that makes you do a double-take the first time you hear it. Low, searching, a little cracked at the edges. Love’s description of him sounding like “a 600-year-old man” is funny but not inaccurate. There is something worn and weathered about his vocals that feels at odds with how young the band actually is.

Getting Killed is the record that moved them from buzz band to something more substantial. It is noisier and more confident than Projector, their 2022 debut, pushing harder into psychedelia and classic rock territory without losing the spiky post-punk energy that defined that first record. The guitar work throughout is restless, always looking for the odd angle in a chord progression, never content to sit in a groove for too long. It is the kind of record that rewards headphone listening at high volume.

The band includes Winter on vocals and guitar, alongside Dominic Lapointe, Gus Green, Foster Hudson, and Max Bassin. They started playing together as teenagers in New York, and there is still something of that garage-band kinship in the way they perform. Live, they are considerably more feral than the records, which are already pretty feral.

The current UK tour has been receiving strong reviews, and the attention from Love seems to have translated into actual ticket sales. They are at a moment where their reputation has outrun their catalog size in an interesting way. Two records in and people are already talking about them as a potentially significant band rather than an interesting project.

Whether they can sustain that trajectory depends on what comes next. Getting Killed gave them something to build on. The question is whether the ambition and the execution stay aligned as the stakes get higher. Based on the evidence so far, there is no particular reason to think they won’t.