Bon Iver returned with “Sable”, an EP of three mostly-acoustic songs that were his most stripped-back since “For Emma, Forever Ago”, but with the kind of grizzled reflection that’s to be expected of the 17 years of life Justin Vernon lived since that pivotal debut album. It seemed like a return to form, but as Justin put it in a recent interview with The New York Times, it was more like “the last gasping breath of my former self that really did feel bad for himself.” Those three songs now double as the first three tracks of the new full-length Bon Iver album, “Sable, Fable”, and the rest of the album is a more modern representation of Bon Iver, which transformed over the years from Justin’s solo project into a many-membered collective.
The difference is really clear by the fifth track, “Everything Is Peaceful Love,” a dose of soulful, funky, R&B-infused pop that counteracts Bon Iver’s sadboy era with positivity, joy, and rhythm. “I’m not saying nothing bad about the old stuff,” he said in that NYT interview, “but now I’m just much more like, hey, we don’t got much time left to live — let’s be sexy.”
Justin Vernon is finally happy! And he sounds perhaps more enchanting as a man embracing joy as he did as a lone wanderer in the wintery woodlands of Wisconsin. The album opens on familiar ground with the Sable tracks, and these build beautifully until we reach Fable and Vernon exclaims: “January ain’t the whole world”. From there on the album is a gorgeous celebration of accepting love and happiness through some incredibly vibey and experimental songs in the Bon Iver signature. “If Only I Could Wait”, with Danielle Haim is a standout, alongside “Walk Home”, and the slow submergence into steady love through the album closers There’s a Rhythm and Au Revoir is simply perfect.
Sharon Van Etten has shifted her approach many times over her career, first releasing stripped down songs as a solo singer/songwriter before embracing bigger rock songs and more synth-driven material. With her latest, she and her band crafted a fully collaborative record of songs that came to life through looser jam sessions, and as a result, it’s the first album credited to Sharon van Etten and the AttachmentTheory. Early singles like the Essential Track “Afterlife” find Van Etten and company delving into a darker art-pop sound that’s rich in its arrangement and with a little more goth in its bloodstream.
Definitely couldn’t have predicted the impact of this one as I’d lost my way with SVE. With her new theory attached, however, the songs are harmoniously both more robust and complex, and more poised in their simplicity, with the intoxicating instrumentation shifting between weightlessness and heftiness.
There’s only the odd mention of parenting on Sharon Van Etten’s new album, co-written for the first time with her band, the Attachment Theory. But early years imprinting – one aspect of attachment theory – has lasting echoes in adult behaviour, and what we do to each other has long been a theme in the American singer-songwriter’s compelling work, so much so she trained as a counsellor and has ambitions to be a psychotherapist.
After a period hanging out with country-leaning fellow travellers such as Angel Olsen and Margot Price,Van Etten is back in rock mode for her seventh album overall, but with a twist: this record’s tonal choices often favour wafting, almost gothic resonances. Synths hover, Van Etten’s voice swoops; everything is gauze in a draught. There has always been something wonderfully smeared about her melodic voice, but the icy shadow in which everything here is cast often distracts from her searching songcraft, so replete with queries and ruminations. “Southern Life (What Must It Be Like”) is winningly mantric, one instance of simpatico between track and treatment. But Van Etten is on far more substantial 80s ground with Idiot Box, which has the scope and heft of Bruce Springsteen.
From the off, Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory is sonically different from Van Etten’s previous work. Writing and recording in total collaboration with her band for the first time, Van Etten finds the freedom that comes by letting go – letting go of her normal modus operandi or the need for control or attachment to the outcome. No safety net. It’s somewhat terrifying, but also liberating. The result of that liberation is an exhilarating new dimension of sound and songwriting. The themes are timeless, classic Sharon – life and living, love and being loved – but the sounds are new, wholly realized and sharp as glass.
This new approach–releasing music under this new moniker–began with inviting her bandmates into the creative process. Rehearsing in the desert for an upcoming tour, Van Etten describes an epiphany: “For the first time in my life I asked the band if we could just jam. Words that have never come out of my mouth – ever! But I loved all the sounds we were getting. I was curious – what would happen?” Magic, apparently. “In an hour,” she says, “we wrote two songs that ended up becoming ‘I Can’t Imagine’ and ‘Southern Life’.”
A stark and dark doom synth sequence opens the album and lead song “Live Forever”. A crack of sharp, electronic white noise propels the track with a frenetic urgency, as Van Etten asks the question that we all have to answer eventually:
“Who wants to live forever? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter…”
This type of wisdom didn’t always come easy for Van Etten. She has been an artist in control of her powers for many years; but now, working in lockstep with this band, that wisdom permeates in new ways. “Afterlife” is a case in point: popcorn synths mesmerize as they dance around the words and melody. Despite the subject matter (will those we love still be with us when our lives end?), or maybe because of it, it’s elevated by The Attachment Theory’s new sound. The music is sweetly cascading, almost euphoric.
“Somethin’ Ain’t Right” is both moody and contagiously danceable, powered by sequenced synth from keyboardist/vocalist Teeny Lieberson, an ostinato that weaves together the whole track into a cohesive whole. “Fading Beauty” begins with a barely audible musical motif before Van Etten’s voice creeps in like smoke. Here, Van Etten deepens the discourse that animates so much of her catalogue, exploring what it is to be simply human. This is her genius – oblique, but also relevant and personal.
The foundation of The Attachment Theory is Jorge Balbi on drums, as Van Etten says, “Jorge has really beautiful feel, he can stay behind the beat. So, he’s got that sensitivity… He’s open to exploring different kinds of technology, which I’m still learning about myself.” Van Etten describes bassist Devra Hoff as “very sensitive to melodies. I was so excited to play with a bass player that was driving and melodic,” she says, “and very sensitive to the songwriting.”
The trio was completed by Teeny Lieberson on keys/vocals. “It’s a very spiritual thing,” explains Van Etten, “to sing harmonies with somebody and just sing together in general. Her sense of harmony is incredible. All the textures that I wouldn’t intuitively use. I haven’t had that in a really long time.” Lieberson continues, “it is rare for me to feel completely at ease in the studio, especially coming from working mostly with male producers. I believe this is one of the few times I’ve felt encouraged and completely free in my creativity.”
Producer Marta Salogni (Bjork, Bon Iver, Animal Collective, Mica Levi) added another vital element, as both a connector and a producer renowned for her skills with synthesizers and electronics. “Her love of synths and sense of adventure was a huge draw to me. Her predilection for tapes and analog instruments was super exciting.” Salogni also proved adept at balancing the group, “facilitating many different personalities, fielding ideas from the different perspectives and making sense of the collective thoughts,” Van Etten continues. “I wanted to ensure the band that I would find a producer who would embrace the darkness and the unique sounds we had honed in the writing process.”
While it was conceived in the desert, the album’s recording took place in London. Here, the band’s mystical mix of electronics and analog textures found a perfect match at Eurythmics’ former studio, The Church.
Reflecting on this new artistic frame of mind, Van Etten muses, “Sometimes it’s exciting, sometimes it’s scary, sometimes you feel stuck. It’s like every day feels a little different – just being at peace with whatever you’re feeling and whoever you are and how you relate to people in that moment. If I can just keep a sense of openness while knowing that my feelings change every day, that is all I can do right now. That and try to be the best person I can be while letting other people be who they are and not taking it personally and just being. I’m not there, but I’m trying to be there every day.”
Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory is a quantum leap in that direction.
While John Grant busied himself with his Creep Show side-project, Bella Union’s supersub Brian Christinzio brilliantly seized his chance. The New Jersey-born, Manchester-resident, Christinzio’s sixth BC Camplight LP presented a litany of trauma – most recently, the end of a long-term relationship – as a kind of tragicomic, self-deprecating musical, its memorable showstoppers delivered by an unreliable narrator in a Kermit onesie who could claim, audaciously, that It Never Rains In Manchester.
A baroque pop auteur who fit snugly into a triumvirate with labelmates John Grant and Father John Misty, Brian Christinzio also shared their ability to make simultaneously wry, accessible and moving music about personal trauma. His seventh album pivoted on how he was abused in his teens by an adult at summer camp – and how he would speak to that abuser three decades on: “I don’t want to hate anything anymore.”
Memories can be like doors. Most of these mnemonic doors are left wide open, allowing one to go in and out when necessary. However some memory doors have been slammed shut, locked and bolted. A “Don’t Come In” warning sign being affixed like a teenager’s bedroom. Brian Christinzio (known musically as BC Camplight) has many closed doors in his mental bank.
Over the course of his discography, the Manchester-based American has used humour – containing sarcasm and pop culture references – as a distraction from opening the entrances to his demons. Even using this technique when trying to make sense of the recent breakdown of his long term relationship.
“A Sober Conversation” is the 45-year-old’s attempt – rather humanly he fails at times – to tackle his worst problems head on; depression, alcoholism, fear of fatherhood. As well as bravely confessing for the first time that the root of his mental problems is mostly like an incident of childhood abuse.
BC Camplight’s 7th album, as the album title suggests, is essentially a series of awakening conversations. Mostly sung but also can be just spoken. Sometimes the conversations are with a female companion, which is the case on ‘Two Legged Dog’ (The Last Dinner Party’s Abigail Morris) and ‘Bubbles In The Gasoline’ (Peaness’s Jessica Branney). Such is his mental state, the conversations are also with imagined characters or imagined situations; whether taking place at present time or reciting them as if they happened in the past. Ultimately, he is unleashing his deep dark thoughts to the listener but in the kind of indirect way that a shy person who avoids eye contact or constantly dresses up in a persona would chat.
Softening her sound without sacrificing her edge, Billy Nomates takes a great artistic leap forward on her third and best album to date. “Metalhorse” is presented as a concept album, based in a dilapidated funfair. The title track evokes a merry-go-round, while The Test takes us into a hall of mirrors. However, aside from those references and the odd rinky-dink keyboard flourish, the idea doesn’t really get in the way. The ambition and scope of this record will take many by surprise. Fierce humour was her initial trademark, but times have indeed changed: these days, a wider emotional range is required. When they bring the curtain down on 2025, expect Billy Nomates to stand tall among this year’s winners.
Tor Maries, to use her given name, burst on to the scene in the midst of the pandemic with her spiky debut release. It was a searing and scathingly funny despatch from life on the margins in the UK. With devastating precision, she chronicled dead-end jobs in factories, offices and supermarkets, while looking askance at the “hippy elite” who somehow floated above all the “happy misery” around her.
Her first attempt to expand her reach came with “Cacti” in 2023, which turned out to be a transitional album. The rage was still there on songs such as “Spite”, while others cried out for a fuller treatment than Maries’s multi-instrumental self-sufficiency could provide. Now, on “Metalhorse”, Billy Nomates has bandmates at last, as well as some ace melodies to sweeten her lyrical insights.
The sound is broader and smoother than before, with prominent piano and multi-tracked vocals, plus an array of sly sound effects. At the same time, rhythm section Mandy Clarke on bass and Liam Chapman on drums preserve the music’s grit and maintain its punky integrity.
The brooding, Hugh Cornwell-assisted “Dark Horse Friend” (“you struck a deal with the other side”) is one of the finest pop tunes you will hear all year. Other songs, particularly “Life’s Unfair” and “Strange Gift”, hint at the pain Maries has undergone in recent times following the death of her father. And her own personal struggle comes out in Nothing Worth Winnin, which portrays the music industry as a fairground where the prizes are worthless.
Yet for every darker moment, there is one of true transcendence, especially the sublime, uplifting Plans. While Billy Nomates’ “comedic timing” – still intact, for all that – allows her to laugh in the face of doom, the redemptive power of love wins out over the impending apocalypse.
“They’ve got plans for us/But while the city rusts/Let’s get away,” she sings. “I bet they’re really bad,” she adds, before snarling: “Sky high AI, World War Three, ah fuck it,” and concluding: “The end of the world should not come between us.”
Even so, disaster finally strikes in the closing track, just when we were all facing the other way. “Everything just goes/When the moon explodes/And all this time you spent looking at the sun.” No one can say Maries doesn’t think big.
“Metalhorse” is presented as a concept album, based in a dilapidated funfair. The title track evokes a merry-go-round, while The Test takes us into a hall of mirrors. However, aside from those references and the odd rinky-dink keyboard flourish, the idea doesn’t really get in the way.
For too long, it had been depressingly easy to categorise Evan Dando as a great talent squandered. 2025, though, brought a sober reckoning with his past in the shape of a meaty memoir, plus his first album of new songs in 19 years. Extremely good songs, too, recorded in São Paulo, that mixed the old scrappy joie de vivre with hard-won wisdom. Among the guests – Juliana Hatfield, J Mascis and key songwriting foil Tom Morgan, as you’d hope.
‘Fear of Living’, a reflective upbeat slice of perfect pop with a grittier Evan at the helm and a riff that’s plucked from the very heart of rock ‘n’ roll.
Playing all the instruments on the recording, the new single was recorded and produced by Apollo Nove at A9 Audio in São Paulo, Brazil. Evan is also currently working on the first Lemonheads songs since 2006. ‘Fear Of Living’ was written by the late Dan Lardner of QTY and Evan Dando. Dan was a close friend of Evan’s who passed in June of 2023. “I met with Dan in 2022, he sent me ‘Fear Of Living’, I added some riffs and things, and he said he liked it. I shall miss you, Dear Prince, ever the most dignified person in the room.”
Deeply confessional and magical indie folk. From: Edinburgh, Scotland, For fans of: Jeff Buckley, Adrianne Lenker. Though they’ve only released a spattering of singles to date, Jacob Alon’s remarkably assured voice and deeply poetic outlook already set them up to etch their name into a canon of singer-songwriters who weave magic from the ordinary fabric of life.
They daydream of a world more whimsical than the one we find ourselves in – and, when you hear Alon’s imposing vocals, forged in Edinburgh’s folk clubs and defined by their devastating simplicity and clarity – you’ll find yourself tiptoeing into it, too.
Heatworms’ striking debut album is a modern classic, fusing post-punk, darkwave and electronic influences into nine edgy, tension-filled tracks. Never shying away from the thorny issues of the day, it tells its tales with a theatrical flourish. For all of its intensity, it delivers a compulsive floor-filling danceability that should have packed the smoke-filled dancefloors of any good alternative club night.
It’s no small compliment when I say that listening to “Glutton For Punishment” left me with a serious knot in my chest. Heartworms is the musical alias of 26-year-old Jojo Orme, and she prides herself on this fractured, often dread-inducing discourse within the songs she creates. Her 2023 EP “A Comforting Notion” was a brief encapsulation of Heartworms’ pronounced style—a mashup of dark post-punk and hardcore industrial, but it left Orme feeling bogged down by the genre-defining expectations it set in place. Instead, “Glutton For Punishment” is a dilated full-length debut, rooting itself in the minimalist aesthetics of late ‘90s UK dance and carving paths into amenable pop hooks while retaining that atmosphere of overall chaos and emotional discomfort. Standout tracks like “Jacked” and “Warplane” are a far cry from the sounds of her EP.
Orme sings about the haunting effects of war-torn violence, the flawed perspective of the human condition and the many shattered relationships she’s faced throughout her life, draped behind sharp, stinging guitars and ethereally warped techno beats. Orme elaborated on the musical growth Heartworms underwent in crafting the debut record saying: “With my EP, people kind of pigeonholed me into post-punk. I was like, ‘Cool, I can do that, but I can also do way more’—I can do post-punk, but I can also be poppy and catchy, and this album represents that. I think people might be surprised when they hear it.”
“It is rare to see artists come bolting out the gate with such a strong identity, but here is someone who knows exactly who they are, what they want, and still daring to achieve more.”
For Nottingham quartet Divorce, home is a feeling. Initially meeting as teenagers through the city’s close-knit DIY scene, the band – completed by members Tiger Cohen-Towell (vocals / bass), Felix Mackenzie-Barrow (vocals / guitar), Adam Peter Smith (guitar / synth) and Kasper Sandstrøm (drums) – came together as Divorce in mid-2021, releasing a slew of genre-defiant singles that quickly caught the attention of tastemakers the world over.
Sonically rich and lyrically open-hearted, ‘Drive to Goldenhammer’ sees Divorce assemble a shelter for themselves amid the chaos and leave the front door open to everyone. This album pays homage to seeking place and home; one of the great human levellers.
Much of life feels at odds with this particular need. And to Goldenhammer; you are a reason to keep driving. We will find you again and again!
Die Spitz “the best new band in the world”, and on the evidence of this album it’s difficult to argue. “Something To Consume” sounds like a record from four women who’ve grown up with brilliantly compiled playlists, rather than genre restrictions, and they’re happy to defiantly mix metal, grunge and snarling punk savagery as if it were the most natural thing in the world, all while swapping instruments willy-nilly. Never has fury sounded like so much fun.
“‘Something To Consume’ darts between styles with brutish energy and a sense of anarchic fun. At times, it feels like you’re a teenager discovering synapse-fizzing sounds all over again as they pinwheel between punk, shoegaze and classic rock.”
Die Spitz are rad as hell. Look no further than their resume: The punk foursome have opened for (and earned big ups from) bands like OFF!, Amyl and the Sniffers, Viagra Boys, and Sleater-Kinney. Any questions? “Something to Consume“, their debut full-length, arrives via Third Man Records and sees the 22-year-old Austinites strike a chord between their multifarious influences with punk chutzpah and grunge grit. While the opening pop-punk/alt-rock numbers go down smooth enough, the clobbering doom-metal chug of “Throw You On The Sword”—Black Sabbath jump scare!—followed by “AmericanPorn” feminist rage à la Hole, will set you straight. As the contorted, monstrous figures on the album cover might suggest, Die Spitz wrestle with the American condition of being both the consumed and the consumer, both politically and personally.
On its softer moments, like the atmospheric “Sound To No One” or the languid “Go Get Dressed” with its Xanned-out slide guitar, romance and drugs become means of escape as one consumes to disappear, while a song like “Voir Dire” pushes back against the games that the elite play in our face (“You can get what you want, but you’ll beg for what you need”).
Other tracks like the tongue-in-cheek “Red40” (“I don’t want it, but I need that shit”) and punk thrasher “RIDING WITH MY GIRLS” are a more lighthearted means to an end (the end being surviving under patriarchy and capitalism). They’re fierce, they’re brash, they’re hot and cool—Die Spitz have quickly risen to the top of my list of “Bands I Need to See Live.”
Geese went from little-known cult New York act to your dad’s favourite new band over just a few months at the end of last year after the release of their fourth album “Getting Killed” in September. Soon, frontman Cameron Winter, who had released his own solo album earlier in the year, was being hailed as the next Bob Dylan/Tom Waits/Leonard Cohen/Jesus and his show at the Roundhouse caused pandemonium.
As such, Geese’s show at the Kentish Town Forum in March not so much a hot ticket as a ticking time bomb… their ramshackle shaggy indie brilliance fits the venue but their level of fame suddenly does not. It’s going to be a hell of a show, if you can get in. As for those still mystified why they have gone massive against others of their ilk, well, just give “Getting Killed” another listen… takes a few spins but once you get it, you really get it. Geese to take the year again? Well, if they drop another album, as this prolific outfit tend to do whenever they feel like it, you wouldn’t be surprised.
I kept thinking about his use of the word warlike as I spun Geese’s revelatory new album, “Getting Killed”, which wastes no time pointing to the carnage all around while spending most of it in a fervid, ludicrous freefall that fills the gaps between the bizarre chaos of 2023’s “3D Country” and Cameron Winter’s solo album “Heavy Metal”. It rides a car with a bomb, becomes the car, becomes the road going nowhere. why its lawlessness felt so graceful: there’s something Godlike about it.
Desperation looks good on Geese. In the past four years, the New York band has demonstrated an ability to rock out and sprawl out with the best of them, but it took until vocalist Cameron Winter’s understated solo album, “Heavy Metal”, for the emotional core to surface. Part of this breakthrough can be attributed to Winter’s voice: a slurred, straining warble whose cryptic delivery can feel like both sides of an argument you’re overhearing through apartment walls. He gets your attention in jarring ways, then turns around and breaks your heart. No artist has muttered the phrase “fuck these people” so meaningfully in a piano ballad.
As evidenced by this moment, occurring just under a minute into his tender 2024 solo single “$0,” Geese can give the impression of an ambitious band skeptical of its own ambition, fitting for a group formed when its members were in high school. Like a lot of precocious young people, they seem energized by the possibility of an audience recognizing their potential before they do, a tension they have used to subvert their more crowd-pleasing turns. This is how “Cowboy Nudes,” a highlight from 2023’s “3D Country”, winds up with a soulful chorus that could have landed on any generation’s FM rock radio alongside a series of exclamations that might be edited out by any generation’s record executives.
Trinidad
Geese may be positioned as young luminaries salvaging rock ‘n’ roll for the new generation, but they make one thing clear: their music is hardly effortless. Not just because they’ve proved themselves more than a group of prodigious post-punks, as “Projector” gave some the impression, but because they’re so quick to squander the genre’s easy tricks. In place of any kind of swaggering riff, ‘Trinidad’ staggers about, as actual geese might, portending chaos. Before repeatedly shouting the JPEGMAFIA-assisted refrain, “There’s a bomb in my car!” Cameron Winter begins by singing the words “I tried,” adding in a “so hard” as a haunted double echoes the exhaustion. The threat is a jolt of adrenaline, sharpening his pen as well as his emphatic intonation. The apocalypse is well underway: “Nothing’s been said for four and a half days/ When that light turns red I’m driving away.” Here the double swirls over Winter’s lead, panned to mirror the voices in his head, as the rest of the band gestures toward what might only be called self-implosion.
Cobra
If you heard ‘Taxes’ before the album’s release, its most quotable line, “There is only dance music in times of war,” will spring to mind when ‘Cobra’ comes on. Having fervently established these are times of war, Winter sings, over a woozy jangle, “Baby, let me dance away forever.” Far from joyously rebelling, though, he’s entranced with no semblance of control, stuck in eternal obedience before defiantly despairing, “You can make the cobras dance/ But not me.” The double meaning of the opening line dawns on you: “Let me dance away forever.” Dispel the curse.
Husbands
The album’s first substantial groove, but compare that to IDLES’ ‘Gift Horse’, another equestrian-themed track from another Kenny Beats-produced album, Tangk: This is not about how fast and muscular his horse is, about “Look at him.” It’s not about making people move, either. The punishing bass and jumbled percussion, instead, evoke just how arduous it is to get ahead, tracing the weight on the singer’s body: “There’s a horse on my back/ And I may be stomped flat/ But my loneliness is gone.” Maybe not, he concedes – maybe no amount of pressure can numb the gnawing feeling out of existence. “And if my loneliness should stay/ Well, some are holiest that way.” You’ve probably heard that rationalization from a disaffected, hard-working man in your life; unless, of course, it’s buried in your head.
Getting Killed
A Ukrainian choir sample stands in for everybody in the world – a cacophony over which Winter can’t hear himself talk, so he must belt out one of his most impassioned performances, treading the line between operatic and just frantic. Yet underlying it is a professed emotional bankruptcy – “I can’t even taste my own tears/ They fall into an even sadder bastard’s eyes” – that could push any lover away. The loneliness allows him to indulge in escapist tendencies that illuminate and lend credence to the album’s title: “I’m getting killed by a pretty good life.” There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cut in the middle of the track that sounds like losing your mind for a small second, then falling inconspicuously back into the rhythm of that same life that almost snapped you out.
Islands of Men
Guitarist Emily Green and bassist Dominic DiGesu stab at their instruments as if trying to force the truth down our throats: “You can’t keep/ Running away/ From what is real/ And what is fake,” Winter sings, accusatory but unable to extricate his own narrator from the delusion. As if literally responding to Winter’s call, the band literally stops, again, halfway through, then picks up the slow-burn, letting Winter’s poetic improvisations take the back seat while occasionally aligning in holy harmony. Instead of Winter’s voice, it’s for once the high piano notes and touches of brass that serve as harbingers of ecstasy. Not even he can outrun them.
100 Horses
Unlike ‘Gift Horse’, the stomp of ‘100 Horses’ is not sleek – it’s skronked-out, trashy, borderline violent. Still, the song – even as Winter hilariously clarifies that it’s “maybe 124” – is nothing short of bombastic, getting fired up on the sarcasm and dance, two things he still has the absolute freedom to practice in times of war. “He said that I would never smile again, but not to worry,” he sings, referring to one General Smith, and you can practically see the nervous grin on his face. “For all people must stop smiling once they get what they’ve been begging for.” Some people have been begging for an album like “Getting Killed, that captures the current feeling of a burning circus without sounding, for a lack of better word,cringe– Geese deliver because they’re good at cringing at the world around them while sounding absolutely serious. “We have danced for far too long and now I must change completely” is not the best marketing pitch, but it’s one hell of a closer. Grooveless Geese could still kill it.
Half Real
The change comes in the form of the album’s first (sort of) ballad, one that sways with the force of Winter’s idiosyncratic and humorous spirituality, contending, “You may say that our love was only half real/ But that’s only half true.” He tries to find some grace in the beatific arrangement, but a lobotomy sounds more worth it for the price. When another voice joins him in pleading to “get rid of the good times too,” you cannot doubt the heart of this record. You won’t be able to get it off your mind, either.
Au Pays du Cocaine
The song hews closest to the ragged lullabies of “Heavy Metal“, but nothing on that album was quite so emotionally or musically direct, if only to highlight its own obliviousness. When Winter’s voice shrinks to declare that he’s alright (way less convincing than the preceding “It’s alright”), you can’t help but feel the defeat, never more pronounced than when he sings, “You can change and still choose me.” The guitar line sounds like sunshine sparkling on waves, the rhythm almost like a breeze. Fake, obviously – he’s standing on a sinking boat – and the reality of his desperation is just as unassailable. He realizes he can’t run away from either, so he must believe.
Bow Down
The narrator must transform again: “I was a sailor and now I’m a boat/ I was a car and now I’m the road.” (On the title track, he was “a TV on the road.”) This is the band’s ragtime depiction of hell, reaching the point of mania where even the singer’s close circle sounds bemused by his self-talk, each musician going off on their own unhinged tangent.
Taxes
When ‘Taxes’ dropped in July, it felt like a first taste of “Getting Killed’s” unique lunacy. As the penultimate track on the album, it almost sounds like a comedown, a moral reckoning. Compare the way Winter sings “Now I’m in hell” on the previous song to the utter resignation with which he sentences himself there. At this point, there’s no telling what the difference is between defiance and despair, not even when he intones, “Doctor, doctor! Heal yourself!” What’s clear is that any sort of faith beyond the self has been crushed; he’s not clinging to love. “I will break my own heart from now on,” he belts, barely piecing himself together.
Long Island City Here I Come
Equal parts percussive workout and spiritual catharsis, ‘Long Island City Here I Come’ reveals the album’s origins as a series of jams, and you can easily imagine Geese stretching this one back out to 10 or even 20 minutes (as if they need more convergence with the world’s biggest jam band). But it’s also the sound of a band (or a frontman urging his band) pummeling towards uncertainty, through total annihilation. In a spectral vision, Winter is told “a masterpiece belongs to the dead.” Which means it belongs to the scared and nervous, who may well find home in “Getting Killed”.
“Getting Killed” by Geese
From New York’s dive bars to Times Square billboards, Geese have somehow spun pure chaos into unstoppable global momentum. The reaction to their 3rd album has been explosive. So it has deservedly earned its place as our second Dinked ‘Heavy Rotation’ Edition – brought to you in a fancy new colourway with a bonus 7” of 2 exclusive live tracks recently recorded in London at The George Tavern.
“Getting Killed” lands like a seismic shock – a chaotic comedy, shambolic in structure but laser-focused in vision. It trades classic rock mythology for something stranger and more self-destructive, balancing big riffs and choir samples with lyrics about war, anxiety, and emotional ruin. The result is a jagged, joyfully unhinged triumph that is clear testament as to why this quartet are being hailed “one of the most respected bands of their generation”.
The Fat Angel Sings 