All people must smile in times of war. 

Those are the first words uttered on “100 Horses” by Geese off their brand new record Getting Killed. Sitting at a crossroads between propaganda, compliance, and the performance of normalcy in the face of catastrophe and carnage, they are some of the most prescient lyrics I’ve heard in recent years. And in New York City, the financial capital of America, the “smile in times of war” isn’t just performed; it’s commodified. 

Whether intentional or not, location always rubs off on the art created there. The grim realities and daunting futures of New York City in today’s climate has been a constant theme in Geese’s output, most explicitly when they heralded the age of “New York City underwater” in their rollicking end-times hoedown “Cowboy Nudes.” Getting Killed not only expands on these themes, it takes the idea of New York City being bound up in survival theater and flips it on its head. 

If you ask the average American townie who’s never been to New York — someone with a glossy, movie-fed perception of it being the city of magical thinking where all dreams and opportunities are possible — to describe New York in one turn of phrase, “almost uninhabitable” wouldn’t crack the list. But that’s genuinely how it feels to live here sometimes. Affordable housing is non-existent, strangers bark at you on the street, the pungent stench of urine and leaky garbage coats the sidewalks, and hordes of NYPD officers patrol the subways like they’d rather be anywhere else (thanks, Eric Adams). Everywhere we go, we operate under the knowledge that we can never become overly attached to any place, because blink for a second and your favorite corner café, dive, or DIY music spot will be gone. Finality is a way of life here. As my friend Sam Sumpter put it, “[New Yorkers] are used to seeing our favorite places disappear. It’s why we always wear black.” 

And yet, we love it. Where many people crave structure in order to feel in control of their lives, I’ve found a certain liberation in surrendering to spontaneity. Every night here is an invitation to take a plunge into the unknown. One of my favorite quintessentially New York nights in recent memory was a Saturday in August when my best friend called at 5 p.m. about a birthday party. By 6, I was in a stranger’s backyard in Long Island City, swatting mosquitos and drinking White Claws. By 8, I was biking over the bridge to Williamsburg for another party. By 3 a.m., I was crouched on a curb outside my friend Raven’s place, eating soup dumplings in the thick August heat. Yes, it’s chaos. But only here does chaos feel like potential. 

Geese frontman Cameron Winter distilled this phenomenon into 17 razor sharp words on the title track:

I have been fucking destroyed by the city tonight

I’m getting killed by a pretty good life

If you want to know exactly how listening to this album feels, re-read that title out loud to yourself and you’ll have your answer. It has all of the idiosyncrasies that make up a great art-rock record. Some of these tracks are the auditory equivalent of sensory obliteration, the stilted time signatures and cacophonous breakdowns of distorted guitars and hissing percussion forming a blunt force trauma to the head that knocks the listener unconscious (“Trinidad”), while other cuts (“Half Real,” “Au Pays Du Cocaine”) are almost lullaby-adjacent, so soft and tender they would make even the most stoic of cynics blush. 

I was born in late 1998, just before the turn of the millennium. The only version of New York I’ve ever known is one that’s hypersurveilled, security-first, and expensive. The members of Geese skew even younger; Winter was born after 9/11. People in our age demographic will never experience the wasteland of 1970s pre-fiscal crisis urban decay where artists could actually afford to live here and scrape by on art alone. But the band still has a grasp on that gritty, captivating, and often destructive spirit that has never left — with the most ecstatic peaks matched only by weeks spent couch surfing in between living arrangements, pawning instruments to cover rent, friendships fractured in the haze of opioid addiction, and winter nights where the heater never came on. On the track “Islands of Men,” Winter circles around one refrain: 

Will you stop running away from what is real? 

In New York, that’s the unspoken challenge every day: not to flee from the volatility, but to let it consume you and see what parts of you survive on the other side. But in many cases, especially for artists, “what is real” in this climate can often be too real to handle. “Tom Verlaine ran away from home and lived on the street with Richard Hell, because that was what you could do in New York in the ‘70s. But now, if you’re making art-rock in New York, you’re fucking screwed. You’re gonna die, you won’t be able to eat,” Winter told Paste Magazine in 2023. 

Winter as a creative force is just as unpredictable and spontaneous as New York itself. In the same Paste Magazine profile quoted above, Geese’s sophomore album 3D Country was described as a record that “succeeds as an anti-homage record because it pulls from rock reference points with a wink and a ‘fuck you, watch this.’” Getting Killed trades the classic rock anti-homage for a full-on disdain for the genre. They may as well have called it Fuck You, Watch This: The Album. 

In the press release for Getting Killed, the record is described as “a chaotic comedy, shambolic in structure but passionately performed.” Decoding the lyrics will be a nightmare for Genius annotators, as they’re riddled with contradictions and evasions. I texted my friend, the brilliant music journalist Grace Robins-Somerville, inquiring what she makes of the lyrics. She said, “Idk they’ve always been a kind of lyrically abstract band, and I picked up a lot of religious and historical allusions. They got kinda black midi with it on this one.” 

So what does it all mean? Is Getting Killed an incisive commentary on the collapse of today’s society through a meta-modernist lens? Or is it all just nonsense stemming from… drugs? There’s no way to know for certain unless we ask — and even that won’t yield any definitive answers, given Winter’s frequent penchant for lying in interviews — a classic misdirection, keeping the mystique alive by never giving a straight answer.

The album closes with “Long Island City Here I Come,” a sprawling six-minute prog rock epic placing theological martyrs like Joan of Arc in mundane circumstances and rendering power structures meaningless and arbitrary. History, religion, and politics fail to provide any direction; in the Geese cinematic universe, the pilgrimage leads only to Long Island City, a symbol of secular banality. 

He said ‘can’t you see,

The Sunday crowds are all my concubines and my enemies’

But he too shall see Long Island City eventually

Maria cried out to me, “you can either leave

Or you can stop playing that cowbell with your gun”

So I say watch out Long Island City, here I come

The lines that linger most are the opening and closing: Winter begins by sauntering in with the swaggering claim, “nobody knows where they’re going except me,” only to close it out by conceding, “I have no idea where I’m going.”

New York is a treacherous lover. We’re all here to an extent because we have no idea where we’re going. The highs will always be accompanied with lows, the pleasure with pain, the type that bites your lip as it kisses you. The real question is are you willing to withstand it? I know what my answer is. The kind of “pretty good life” that I’m willing to “get killed” for in 30 years is yet to be determined. For all I know, it could be a life out in the country, preferring the cicadas to the traffic and the suburban mom-and-pops to the bodegas. But as of right now, I can’t envision myself ever leaving this beautiful chaos. I ain’t running away from what is real.