2025 Album Of The Year

I listened to many albums in 2025, but one of them entranced me like no other.

My album of the year is Getting Killed by Geese. Because of course it is.

I am writing in the midst of total geesemania, a geese fever, an obsession, if you will. But oh man, is it not so much fun to love something so much it consumes you completely? So, do not expect much of an objective review here, but rather me rambling on about how much I’ve been into Geese this year.

I am experiencing that stage of infatuation-obsession-love where you try so desperately to describe what it is that you’re feeling, as if you’re the first and only person ever to feel it, and it seems impossible. The only word you can use is ‘love’ and just hope that whoever is reading it will understand the utter mania you’ve been sent into over this something.

This is how I feel about the music Cameron Winter & co. write and make at the moment. I am listening to the album as I write this, and it has nearly reduced me to tears just thinking about how much I love it. It happens every so often—about once per year, I’d say—that an album genuinely entrances me and I literally can not stop listening to it. I wake up with a song stuck in my head, I want to blast every note directly into my brain at the same time, I get too impatient to get to the good part of the song, but I don’t want to skip all the other good parts, and do you see now how an obsession can work?

Geese played a free show on a closed-down street at Banker’s Anchor in Greenpoint, NYC the day after the album’s release. Photo by Tommy Krause / Occult Magazine

I don’t know what I can write here, on a blog I doubt many will read (hiiii <3), that hasn’t been written before by writers and critics and journalist much better at writing than I am. I am none of these things, I’m just a girl who really loved an album this year. So maybe I can write something different? And besides, there has been so much discourse about Getting Killed online since it came out, or maybe I got a little too sucked into it by the Twitter algorithm.

Geese were at the centre of this year’s Great Indie Rock Discourse. Are they the saviours of rock music? Is Cameron Winter the voice of a generation? Are they nepo babies? Privileged upper-class brooklynites who have only ever been told that they can do whatever it is they dream of? Or are they the first truly great zoomer rock band? Are they finally doing something original? Or are they just a rip-off of [insert any great rock band of the last 40 years here]? Are they… *gasp* overrated?

Usually when I see people online criticising something I love(d) negatively, I start to doubt my love, I start to wonder if I had been completely blinded by an intense feeling. But it didn’t happen this time (or maybe it hasn’t happened yet? Though, I don’t really know what kind of scathing review I’d have to read in order to turn on them as artists). I’ve become a complete and total ride or die for Geese this over the course of the last year.

There have been many memes made and shared on the topic of “You will know someone has been into Geese since before Getting Killed/Heavy Metal because they will tell you.” Now, at the risk of sounding like a complete and total self-righteous asshole, my history with Geese does go nearly as far back as it can go without me living in NYC or knowing the band personally. I’ll get it out of the way, and you’re not here for those details, so long story short (TL;DR: I liked them before they blew up, for which I do reserve bragging rights, thank you very much):

  1. Their 2021 debut album Projector was my 4th most listened album that year;
  2. I didn’t get into their sophomore album 3D Country when it came out in 2023, but have since revisited it and I love it very much now;
  3. I immediately raved about Cameron’s solo work, and knew that Heavy Metal was something incredibly special when I first heard it.

They recorded Getting Killed in L.A. during this year’s devastating wildfires with Kenneth Blume, formerly Kenny Beats, producing. The legend goes that it was them who convinced the producer to drop the Kenny Beats name and just go by his actual full name. I don’t know how factual that is, as there’s a lot of Geese/Cameron Winter lore and tidbits that are just straight up made-up for fun (like Heavy Metal being recorded across different Guitar Centers, and also in the back of a taxi), but I think it could be a sweet little fact nonetheless. The band, together with Kenny, embraced imperfections, they embraced textures, and they made something truly special.

Tracklist

“I tried/ I tried / I tried so hard / I tried
THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR!!!!!”

… is how the album starts. Trinidad is a neurotic cacophony of sounds and noises, it is anxious and tense, barely a song. It explodes and falls apart, leaving shrapnel all around. What is he even saying? It’s hysteric ramblings of a person in the middle of a collapse, one he has no agency over, but one he has to deal with nonetheless. This was the second single, which Cameron leaked before the album’s release, and I’ll admit that, as a single, I did not get or particularly like it. But on the album? I would not swap its place as an opener for any other song. It’s so brutal and abrasive, and completely different from everything else on Getting Killed, that it’s exactly where it needs to be. It is the the introduction to the album and its world, and, in turn a reflection of the times in which it was made.

Going from Trinidad to the next song on the album, Cobra, is complete madness in the best way possible. Cameron goes from screaming “There’s a bomb in my car!!!” from the top of his lungs, to sweetly singing “Baby, let me dance away, forever” over what is the most radio-friendly melody on Getting Killed. Cobra is the album’s sweetest and most danceable song. While I wouldn’t quite call it the best love song ever written, it does have a similar kind of energy to that of Talking Heads’ This Must Be The Place (Naïve Melody), which, depending on who you ask, is one of the best love sings ever written.

It is followed by Husbands, which is a slow build-up of a song. Cameron opens with “I’ll repeat what I say / But I’ll never explain” which is an excellent line to me personally because, as I’ve written about his solo songs before, I find a lot of magic in not fully getting his lyrics. “There’s a horse on my back / And I may be stomped flat / But my loneliness is gone /…/ And if my loneliness should stay / Well, some are holiest that way / Falling apart, falling apart.” Throughout Husbands, more and more sounds and little melodies and rhythms come in as the song comes together. All the instrumentals throughout kind of drag and sway, the same way someone might slur their speech when they’re not entirely there. All of this results in an intentionally disorienting and somewhat chaotic experience, very much fitting for the album.

The title track, Getting Killed, starts at full force with a sample of a Ukrainian choir chant, and only momentarily slows down during the verses and the bridge. He starts the song with “My love takes a long time / Longer than a lover can survive / Morning walked me out of here with no shoes / And one foot doesn’t wanna stay alive” and I can’t help but draw a parallel to his solo song Love Takes Miles. He continues “I can’t even hear myself / I’m trying to talk over everybody in the world” while the choir of voices continues their chant in the background. I think this song encapsulates the chaos and absurdity of the entire album, both lyrically and sonically. Maybe that’s why it’s the title track. Cameron’s vocals are particularly imperfect on this one, which I particularly like. They’re actually like this on the whole album, you can hear his voice break all over. That’s not to say he’s in any way a bad singer—he is absolutely not, and hearing him live proved this to me a billion times over. But one thing about Geese is that they are musically an incredibly tight band. They’re all completely locked in when it comes to their respective instruments, which allows Cameron to let very loose on the vocals. This is a very fun conflict that works perfectly in everyone’s favour.

Islands of Men was the first song written for the album. There’s a 2023 mixed demo version available on YouTube, which in many ways sounds different to the album version, but the core of the song is the same. Isolation, loneliness, alienation, and… the modern (young) man’s crisis. The opening words “You look green” could be a nod to the band’s guitarist, Emily Green—it’s hard not to read the lyrics in another way too, in relation to gender and (trans) identity, particularly the line “You can’t keep womankind in your dreams / You can’t keep running away / From what is real / And what is fake.” The song builds over a repetitive, hypnotic instrumental, there’s a fake ending about halfway though the song, but then it picks up again. “You can’t keep running away / You can’t keep running away / You can’t keep running away / You can’t keep running away.”

100 Horses was the third and final single before the full release of Getting Killed. It expands on the latin phrase Panem et circenses, bread and circuses. “Aaaaaaalalalallalaaaalaala people / all people must smile / in times of war” sings Cameron. It is clear in its message: an anti-war, anti-military, anti-imperialist. Whether it really is about war in the literal military-operation sense, or in a slightly more metaphorical sense, the absurdity and the nonsense of it all is undeniable. “There is only dance music in times of war.”

Half Real stood out to me immediately on first listen because I’m a sucker for a desperate ballad (as one could tell based on my love for Black County, New Road’s Ants From Up There, as well as Cameron’s solo work). To me, this song fits on this record in a similar way to how First World Warrior, another first-listen immediate favourite, fit on their debut, Projector. Half Real is one of the more straightforward songs on the album in its lyrics (together with Au Pays du Cocaine), I don’t think there’s too much mystery to be untangled there. Cameron starts with “He may say that our love / Was only half real” and later continues with a declaration that he’d rather just forget all of it: “I’ve got half a mind / To just pay for the lobotomy / And tell ’em, ‘Get rid of the bad times / And get rid of the good times too’ / I’ve got no more thinking to do.” This one also ends abruptly, but I really like to think of Half Real and Au Pays du Cocaine as a joint package of somber heartbreak ballads.

Au Pays du Cocaine was not a single, but it did get a music video after the album’s release (does that make it one?), and it’s also the song that went the most viral online. I’ve seen many a TikTok edit with the “You can change, you can change / You can change, you can change / You can change, baby, you can change / And still choose me” lyrics soundtracking clips of media from various online fandoms. There are so many reads on what kind of relationship this song is about that I think every listener should just decide on their own—or, to take Cameron’s words to heart: ”I’ll never explain.” But, whoever or whatever you choose to make the subject of the song, it’s the narrator making one final, desperate plea for the other to stay. And I love a devastating, desperate love song.

Although sonically very different, Bow Down concludes the heartbreak trilogy, with callbacks to lyrics from Au Pays du Cocaine (”I was a sailor and now I’m a boat”). To me, Bow Down kind of sets the stage for the album’s closer (Long Island City Here I Come). It has a lot of religious imagery; the narrator’s conversation with an angel mentions Maria (Mother Mary) and Salomon. It’s ultimately a song about changing one’s ways, growing up and maturing, but the angel warns him: “You don’t know what it’s like / To bow down to Maria’s dead bones”—are you ready for a life of devotion, for a life of servitude, for a life of lesser agency? Do you have it in you to do it? Are you sure you want this?

Taxes was the first single off of Getting Killed, and I think if I had to show someone only one song off the album to try and encapsulate it, it would be this one. It has it all – reflection on the 21st century, religious imagery, desperation, discontent, a final resignation (or is it acceptance?), a long sustained vocal and Cameron’s (by now signature) slightly imperfect voice, a fun and strangely uplifting guitar riff that gets stuck in your brain, and behind it all there’s the wonderful drums and rhythm section. I am jealous of everyone who still gets to experience hearing Taxes for the first time. If you haven’t heard it before, I do recommend listening to the version they adapted for the music video, as I think it is a much more rewarding first-listen experience. I won’t spoil anything else. It’s such a great song, and I almost just called it “great little song” because despite its runtime sitting at just slightly over three minutes, it goes by so fast that it barely feels anything more than a minute and a half long.

“Nobody knows where they’re going, except me.” The last track on the album, Long Island City Here I Come, is a six and a half minute long epic, and, in the same way as no other song other than Trinidad could have opened the album, I can’t imagine any other one closing it. The first time I heard it, it was Friday, September 26th, the morning of the album’s release. I put the album on as I was starting to get ready to leave for work, and finished it just before arriving to the office. I remember very vividly the exact location where I first heard the last song, and my immediate thought as it finished was “whoa insane.” And I say this in the best, most complimentary way possible. The album finishes with a total nervous, neurotic, yet somehow optimistic bang. The song mentions so many historic figures and characters—from Joan of Arc, to Charlemange, to Joshua, to Buddy Holly, and, again, Maria, that it really makes it all feel like a true journey, our hero’s big quest. The final statement of the album is one of both doubt and, despite it all, relentless determination. Determination to work towards a masterpiece, one’s life’s work, something that will outlive the artist. Whatever it is, Cameron decided that Long Island City is where he’s headed for it.

Geese close out the album with Cameron declaring “I have no idea where I’m going / Here I come.” And such is the confirmation of Geese’s arrival. They are here.

Getting Killed is an anxious and chaotic album, at times disorienting, appropriate for the times in which it has been written, recorded, released, and revered. Loneliness, uncertainty, anger, existentialism, disdain, and disappointment of being young and growing up in the 21st century. But there’s also a certain comedy in Cameron’s writing, certain humour he employs – he’s a funny guy, in the absurd way that zoomers are. Even though the album is quite bleak, Geese as a band are optimistic in their endeavour of making excellent music. There is a certain kind of confidence in this album. If they were still somewhat finding their feet on Projector, and went batshit crazy and as far as they could on 3D Country, they now find themselves confident—but never too comfortable—in who they are as a band and as artists. They know what they can do, stand firmly on their feet and take risks that really pay off.

It’s undeniable that it’s Cameron Winter’s songwriting, his lyrics, his voice and his delivery that are at the forefront of the record, but none of that alone would make the album the strange and nervous journey it is without the rest of the band. I would love to write that it’s Max’s drumming, together with Dominic’s bass, and Emily’s guitar what carries the album. But the truth is, each of the members play an equally vital role in making the album what it is. They are a real rock band, a group of childhood friends who are on the same wavelength and can make magic together.

There’s been a lot of discourse around whether Geese are The Saviours Of Rock’n’roll Music In the 21st Century™, but I will make a bold, perhaps even contrarian claim here and say that I don’t think they are the ones to Save Rock Music. And I will back this claim up by saying that I don’t think rock music necessarily needs saving. They are, undoubtedly, a great rock band, they are top-of-the-class students of music (ew ew ew Spotify, but check their personal accounts’ public playlist on the band’s page – Cameron has one called ASSTRONOMY 202 and the cover picture is the moon but there’s asscheeks overlaid on top of it and when I first saw it I actually laughed), and they are the best possible continuation of the rock canon. Their influences are too many to list, and when you are being compared to every great rock band and solo songwriter of the last 50 years, are you really being compared to any of them at all? I think what Geese can do, however, is bring good old guitar rock music back into the mainstream and back into the conversation on music of the 2020s. Whether the album will become one of the classics in the rock lineage, or just an overhyped moment at the end of 2025 is something only time will tell. However, I’m confident in saying that, regardless of where it lands in that narrative, it will be, at the very least, a real time capsule of being 20-something in the year of our lord 2025.

Getting Killed is an album that already means a lot to a lot of people but what I think means even more than just the album itself is the ethos of Geese as a band, as musicians, and as artists. They care. And you can tell they make music that they want to make for themselves, stuff they want to have fun with. Even if they describe the recording process as torturous, you can tell they’re in it for the love of the game, and remain uncompromising in their vision. Cameron himself has said that he spends more time tweaking than actually recording, and the band has had producing credits on all of their albums. They really do care and they care a lot.

Most of what I love is at least somewhat mysterious to me, and that’s precisely why I love it. I don’t really understand this album as deeply as I probably could. I don’t understand all of Cameron’s religious and historical references. I don’t get how he can write the lyrics he does at the age that he is. I don’t understand how any of it is possible, how these people came together to make the music they do. Like Cameron sang in Nina + Field of Cops: “Nina, I’m not nothing / But when you lie on the piano / I am reminded I am stupid.” And like I wrote after I saw Cameron Winter perform solo live, I hope I never fully get it. I never want it to lose its magic.

But perhaps what excites me most about Geese in this very moment, is the potential of Geese. I’m genuinely thrilled to be here, to have been early in on the Geese stock and to watch it fly all the way to the moon and beyond, to put it in crypto bro terms. Of course, only time will tell if we really and truly are witnessing rock history in real time, or if it’s all been some very strange online mass psychosis this year. But man, I would be a total liar if I didn’t say that I can’t wait for everything Geese and Cameron do next (and, if my timelines are correct, both the band’s and Cam’s solo album are likely already recorded, or, at the very least, in the process of being recorded).

There is so much more I could write about this album, from its lyrical themes, to all the religious imagery, and to how it all connects to the album cover. But I hope I managed to weave my love and obsession for Getting Killed into this piece of writing nonetheless. As is evident from the couple of thousands of words I poured out about the record, I really truly love it. It is the album that has been most significant to me this year.

Thank you for reading!

With love, always,

-Mia

Here are some additional links I’d recommend if you wan to know more about the band and the album: