The first few weeks of Getting Killer‘s formal arrival into this world were brutal, to be blunt. Any time an album cycle gets shoved down your throat out of seemingly nowhere by a perfect storm of a pricey yet well-executed press, critical praise that may or may have not been influenced by said-pricey press, listener hype, and the subsequent adulation by some of alternative music’s biggest icons, there’s going to be that natural reaction from the skeptics out there feel the need to push back on.

It’s not out of hate or envy, but rather that some of us are still independent listening purists who desire forming our own opinions outside of the bubble rather than being pulled into the energy from within it that in turn further inflates its size. Some of us need our time and our space before we place our ears beyond the surface of an album in order to filter out as much noise that might be interfering with our feelings on it. That initial wave of buzz behind Geese’s Getting Killed needed to die itself before it got a fair shot on this end.

So here it is, an admission that these pages have finally been Geese-pilled by Getting Killed. We so desperately desire idiosyncratic-sounding music in a time of sonic homogeny across all genres, and to receive a weird ass indie rock album like this that sounds a little familiar to past footsteps set forth — here, in an astute lineage of NYC’s storied creative bohemia spanning well past the point of each band members’ own parents’ lifetimes — with the unbothered energy of some young freaks making art outside of algorithmic trend (even if the algorithm itself has awarded the melancholiest of the album’s tracks in “Au pays du cocaine” a helping of bite-sized TikTok virality….) is perhaps why the third full-length effort from the four-piece has become the one thing everyone from veteran punk poets to buzz band survivalists are clinging onto hope with.

Noted as its highlight right from the moment the keys get placed into its bomb-fueled ignition, “Trinidad” in its world folk-noise-rap crashout sets a high bar for what follows, yet what easily makes the rest of Getting Killed the kind of listen that causes your head to curiously tilt at an angle with how so much of it is stylistically obtuse when the tracks are placed side by side. Be it the funky art rock of “100 Horses”, the bar room’s junky jukebox rattling within “Husbands” and “Cobra”, or the ghostly tax-crucifying anthem jamming out across the fields of “Taxes”, frontman Cameron Winter’s distinct multiple vocal personalities occupy a singular space in the music world defined by his unhinged freakouts and dangerously handsome croons.

A trusted voice in my world of music criticism told me that Getting Killed is the kind of album you need a year to form an opinion on because we admittedly have this problem nowadays with fast-coming idolatry in the attention economy. It got a two month post-release lead time over here. That more “patient” approach came with a by-product reminder nonetheless that when it comes to hearing new music outside of our Internet vacuums, we stand a greater chance of experiencing that raw, organic awe of what we’re hearing. Something tells me that Geese took a similar approach here when creating this album so that not only started a strange new wave of rock revivalism, but a revival in revisiting our roots in our relationship with listening to music, too…

Highlights: “Trinidad”, “Cobra”, “Taxes”

Geese’s Getting Killed is available now on Partisan Records / Play It Again Sam.

Buy | Stream