Let's get the superlatives out of the way early: Getting Killed is Geese's best album. It is also their strangest, their most uncompromising, and the one where Cameron Winter finally sounds like a frontman who has stopped caring whether you're keeping up. This is not a complaint.
The New York band's fourth album arrives after Cameron Winter spent 2024 solo — his album Heavy Metal remains one of the year's best — and returns to the full band format with a new producer, a new energy, and a first chorus that is literally the lyric 'THERE'S A BOMB IN MY CAR' delivered as a full-body scream. This is the kind of opening move that separates a band from the pack.
Kenneth Blume — the hip-hop producer formerly known as Kenny Beats — handles production, and the choice shows. Getting Killed doesn't sound like a rock album produced by a hip-hop guy trying to make a rock album. It sounds like two artists who have spent enough time listening to each other's influences to build something genuinely new. The drums are enormous. The bass lines are cyclical and slightly menacing. The guitars occasionally sound like they're being played through old drum machines. It works.
Winter's vocals are the album's gravitational center. His 'slurred, straining warble' — as described by Pitchfork, accurately — is a voice that sounds simultaneously careless and precise, like someone who has practiced how to sound like they haven't practiced. On '100 Horses,' he delivers the line 'All people must die scared or else die nervous' with the cadence of someone reading a cereal box. That's artistry. On 'Forever,' he pairs the most eternal pop-music words with the swagger of a karaoke singer who thinks he's alone. That's also artistry.
Not every track lands perfectly — Getting Killed is long enough to have some structural slack — but the best moments here are as good as anything in indie rock this year. 'Cowboy Nudes Reprise' callbacks land differently after spending time with the full record. The album's back half reveals depths that the chaotic front end obscures.
Getting Killed is the record you play for people who think rock is boring. It is not boring. It is, in fact, one of the most alive albums released in 2025. Grade: A.