“If you want me to pay my taxes,” sang the 23-year-old man on the stage, loudly accompanied by the thousands in front of him, “You better come over with a crucifix/ You’re gonna have to nail me down.”
Last Thursday night, I stood in a field in Dorset, and watched the headlining attraction on the first night of the End of the Road festival. Geese are a rock group from New York, led by the extremely talented Cameron Winter, who has a lot to say, and an often gnomic, veiled way of saying it. But the meaning of the most celebrated lines on his band’s most recent album – Getting Killed – might be clearer than a lot of the rest.
There are hundreds of different interpretations online of a song simply called Taxes, from death and martyrdom to the avoidance of responsibility. He may just, I suppose, be telling the Internal Revenue Service to go away in the cause of small-state libertarianism. But at the risk of ridicule, I’ll opt for the most literal and crowd-pleasing reading: that Winter is inspirationally updating the idea of rock music sneering at the powers that be and rejecting whatever it is they want. When I first heard those lines, in fact, I imagined him being cornered by Donald Trump, JD Vance and some or other Maga goon squad, wearily exhaling and sending them on their way.
For at least a decade now, rock – which is to say, stuff largely made with guitars and mostly delivered by bands – has been in an increasing state of cultural eclipse. Its presence in what remains of the singles chart is usually minimal-to-nonexistent; it tends to fare better in the albums rankings, but chronically lacks its old ability to push itself to the forefront of its era.
It’s striking, then, that Geese’s somewhat belated rise has been powered by an album that consummately embodies its time, has received praise to match and is evidently loved by younger people who were supposed to have long ago become largely rock-phobic (for proof, see the footage of Geese’s performance at this year’s Reading festival). Their current high profile has been powered not just by Getting Killed, but Winter’s much more intimate solo album – titled Heavy Metal – and a one-man performance at Carnegie Hall in New York, about to be released as a film directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Seemingly as a matter of contractual obligation, all four members of his group (including guitarist Emily Green) have hairstyles like those of the early-1970s Rolling Stones, but the music they now make – their first album came out in 2018 – usually suggests something immeasurably more contemporary.
It is variously tender, soothing, angry and explosive, prone to tumble into lengthy improvisation, and sometimes shot through with knowingness that can be maddening, but is presumably the result of working in an artistic field now full of cliches that either have to be acknowledged or swerved around. But when they play live, power, ferocity and sudden snaps between loudness and calm take precedence. Some moments are redolent of Led Zeppelin, but taken somewhere completely different by the lyrical content. Radiohead are another oft-cited reference point, which feels more satisfactory, but only in the sense that Geese largely stay true to the idea that they should sound like no one but themselves and damn the consequences.
This is an age in which a huge amount of popular music is tailor-made for audiences assumed to be in a constant state of distraction, so songs often have the briskest of intros and the crassest, most earworm-ish hook lines. Geese’s music, by contrast, is often gnarly and difficult, and entails friction between the musicians and their listeners. It took me six or seven plays to even start to get my head around Getting Killed, but in an occasionally masochistic way, I enjoyed every minute.
And this, I think, is why. From its title onwards, Getting Killed is full of flickers and flashes of the volatile and frightening condition of both Geese’s home country and the wider world. Among the first words on the album, repeated five times, are “There’s a bomb in my car”, quickly followed by “My daughter is dead.” Other lyrics seem – seem – to reference the crazed ringmaster who has led the US into both internal conflict and disastrous entanglements abroad: “All people/In times of war/Must go down to the circus,” Winter sings on a piece titled 100 Horses, following that up with “There is only dance music in times of war/But we have danced for too long.” What you really yearn for is a zinger akin to Bob Dylan’s “even the president of the United States/Sometimes must have to stand naked.” But Winter’s facility with words suggests he will soon get there, even if he is currently too keen on bathetically bursting his own lyrical bubble and thereby avoiding the “spokesperson for a generation” deadweight that Dylan found so irksome: “There were hundred horses dancing/Maybe 124,” he sings at one point, which isn’t even that funny.
But such slip-ups are rare. At the core of what Geese do is something that is also sharply generational. It’s surely one of the identifying features of people their age that even comparative material comfort (all four were privately educated) doesn’t make the anxiety that comes with being the canaries in the coalmine of digital capitalism unavoidable. The title track puts this point plainly: “I’m getting killed by a pretty good life,” wails Winter. “Getting killed by a pretty good life/I have been fucking destroyed by the city tonight.” A track titled Half Real suggests twentysomethings so understandably confounded that they just want to switch off. On Thursday, Winter sang with such ferocity that any lingering suspicions about archness or humour instantly vanished: “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.”
On the face of it, there may be reasons to keep your distance: their comparatively privileged backgrounds, or a spurt of controversy about the ubiquity and craftiness of their (very common) online marketing. But their empathetic kind of excellence makes those things almost irrelevant. What they excel at is reflecting their audience’s experiences, feelings, passions and furies back at them. At End of the Road, evidence of that connection was consistently there on the giant screen next to the stage. The younger members of the audience pressed against the barrier at the front rejoiced in every note of Taxes, and sang along most loudly to that eternal rebuke to the hypocrisies of power and influence: “Doctor, heal yourself.” But what was most telling was the ecstatic exchange between the band and their core crowd triggered by a simple line from one of Winter’s love songs, which seemed to take on quite another meaning: “I see myself in you.”
They would doubtless hate me for saying so, but still: right now, Geese sound like the accidental representatives of a global demographic that may look sensitive and gentle, but that – in response to the impossibility of just about everything – may yet explode. In that sense, the simplest of messages is woven into what they do: look out.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
