Three years ago, my dentist and I were chatting about music when he asked if I’d heard of Geese, a small band of 20-year-olds from my neighborhood in Brooklyn who made indie rock, which he knew was my favorite genre. I said no, but he recommended I check them out. I asked how he discovered them, to which he told me he was the dentist for one of Geese’s members and thought it prudent to advertise them to me. So later that night, I checked out their then-recent album Projector (2021). It wasn’t bad, just largely forgettable, so the name slipped out of my mind.
Just last month, however, Geese stormed the scene with their album Getting Killed, seizing the front pages of music sites everywhere and earning a coveted 9.0 from Pitchfork. I almost immediately listened to the art rock record, with my dentist in mind the whole time, and I saw what everyone else saw. Stylistically different from the post-punk Projector and the album before Getting Killed, the also critically-acclaimed alt-country 3D Country (2023), Geese has clearly evolved in their ability to create distinctly experimental yet beautifully compelling music.
The album explores the downers of life: death, taxes, addiction and violence. Indeed, the album cover features an obscured gun pointed at the viewer. Yet Getting Killed does this in a curious, unsettled way. Among the first things you hear on the record is “THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR!” surrounded by short, idiosyncratic blasts of music, for instance. Meanwhile, throughout the album, rhythmic drumming and bass provide a nervous tone, especially for songs like “Taxes” or “Bow Down.” The title track prominently features, for some odd but fortuitous reason, a Ukrainian choir. Together with lyrics like “All people must smile / In times of war,” the Getting Killed listening experience is both beautiful and uncomfortable.
There is no stand-out track to most people, but I couldn’t get enough of the song “Cobra.” The lyrics embody the narrator’s struggle against temptation, analogous to a snake resisting being charmed to dance. Yet, the music in “Cobra” strikes an unmistakably positive tone that clashes with the album’s more nihilistic themes. The lead singer and lyricist, Cameron Winter, delivers biblical lines like “Baby, let me wash your feet forever” in a rather sultry manner, showing how powerless the narrator is to their beloved’s charms. It’s not clear if the narrator takes issue with this, though. While they tell their beloved, “You should be ashamed / You should be Shame’s only daughter,” the chipper main riff suggests the narrator feels all the pleasure of being addicted to this woman, even if their relationship has — on the outside — a toxic, controlling dynamic.
Love and its accompanying struggles is a theme found throughout the work of Geese and its members. Cameron Winter achieved breakthrough fame in his own right last December with his debut solo record Heavy Metal. For the album, Winter wrote several songs about narrators similarly blinded by or struggling through love, yet again enjoying the experience all the same. Heavy Metal’s most captivating songs, like “Love Takes Miles” or “Nausicaä (Love Will Be Revealed),” show the silver lining to the effort we put into ourselves and others. After all, “Love takes miles / Love takes years.”
In hindsight, Heavy Metal was the bellwether that Geese would achieve their breakthrough with Getting Killed. By combining Winter's songwriting talent and beautiful, if imperfect, vocals with the contributions of guitarist Emily Green, bassist Dominic DiGesu and drummer Max Bassin, Geese perfected the formula for indie success. But it wasn’t always clear that the members of Geese would follow this trajectory. As the band’s members graduated high school in 2020, they were planning to break up to go to schools like the Berklee College of Music, Swarthmore or Oberlin College, yet they ultimately stuck together after signing with independent record label Partisan Records (Cigarettes After Sex, PJ Harvey, formerly Fontaines D.C.).
That gamble seems to have paid off, but it raises the question of whether a fulfilling and even successful musical career is mutually incompatible with pursuing further studies. It’s no surprise that some of the world’s best-selling artists who made it big at young ages (think Taylor Swift releasing her debut at just 16) have never gone to college. Evidently, these superstars haven’t needed an MBA or a master’s in English literature to make successful business decisions or write hit songs, yet part of why we go to college is because studying what we love brings us joy. Can we get that same fulfillment from a musical career? Is the fulfillment fundamentally different? Which is better? In any case, to the Cornell musicians reading, I hope you have found a way to be able to do what Geese couldn’t and attain all the musical fulfillment they could ever desire in addition to the academic fulfillment from their coursework, however overwhelming it may be at times.
After I fell in love with this band’s music, I’ve come to appreciate the fun little connections I have with them. For one, I lived in their neighborhood, took the same subways, walked the same blocks and knew the same directions as them. Somewhat uncannily, though, the name Geese comes from the fact that the guitarist Emily Green’s nickname in high school was Goose. As someone named Gustavo, I was called Goose in high school! Or Goosey, or Goosey Gang, or Goosey Honk Honk, but that’s no matter. In any case, the tidbits of personal charm to this band keep piling up. So the next time I see my dentist, I’ll be raving to him about Geese and how stupid and shortsighted I was for not listening to them before they were cool. They may not be mainstream yet, however, for the bandwagons in the audience. Now’s your chance. In the words of Cameron Winter, “You better start a-walking, baby.”
Key tracks: “Cobra,” “Taxes” and “Bow Down” by Geese, “Love Takes Miles” by Cameron Winter.
Gustavo Ponzoa is a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at gap87@cornell.edu.
