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.

With the surprise success of Heavy Metal, a less imaginative band might choose to follow some of this industry wisdom, taming their eccentricities and building on the classic songcraft and heart-wrenching lyrics that made their singer a star. Thankfully, Geese are not this type of band. Their third album, Getting Killed, is their strangest and strongest work. This is anxious, fragmented music as liable to erupt in a paranoid shriek as a bald declaration of love. The first chorus on the record is a gravelly, haywire scream: “THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR.” The second makes a meal out of the two most eternal words in pop music: “baby” and “forever,” each delivered with the swagger of a karaoke singer pretending not to notice his crush has entered the room.

Working with producer Kenneth Blume (the hip-hop luminary formerly known as Kenny Beats), the quartet explores a clattering, groove-based sound, denying the structures of traditional rock music while following the same volleys of tension and release. Where their music once felt clouded by a history of hip NYC forebears, they now cast their future wide open. It’s a style that favors cyclical repetition over crafted hooks, ecstatic bursts of melody that inspire some of Winter’s most commanding writing. In an ominously funky track called “100 Horses,” he assumes the perspective of a general during wartime: “All people must die scared or else die nervous,” he announces. In the context of the song, the news is delivered as something of a comfort; in the context of the record, it’s one of the more obvious choices for a single.

Often, the music feels like the extended fadeouts of more conventional rock songs—I’m thinking of the double-tracked drums and gospel chorus that close out “Tumbling Dice”—taking palpable joy in riding the momentum to a breaking point. Stunners like “Husbands” and “Bow Down” begin with lyrical rhythms from drummer Max Bassin—who leads this record as much as Winter—as guitarist Emily Green and bassist Dominic DiGesu steer toward unexpected shapes: in the former, a soaring, singalong anthem, and the latter, a gnarly chant that recasts their post-punk past in ghostly, hollowed-out tones. Settling into what could now be called a signature sound, Geese seem as comfortable jamming into the wilderness as they do delivering festival-ready anthems like “Taxes” or actual love songs like “Half Real” (although they still manage to incorporate the word “lobotomy”).

The band has spoken about a sense of fear and displacement as they bunkered in Blume’s Los Angeles studio during this past winter’s wildfires, sculpting songs from long, improvised performances. And while Winter still favors bits of clipped dialogue over anything resembling a narrative, he finds new ways to lead the charge, whether toward a punchline, a threat, or a plea. His persistence ensures the music constantly evades expectations. Or, as he puts it over the long crescendo of closer “Long Island City Here I Come,” “I have no idea where I’m going… Here I come.”

The success story of Heavy Metal hinged on the low expectations preceding it: a quiet solo project issued in the middle of the holiday season, a stopgap between major statements. It is likely the last time anything by a member of this band could be received so humbly, and Getting Killed marks an inverse scenario: Geese’s most singularly idiosyncratic music arrives to their largest audience yet. But for all the album’s inspired left turns—trombone, a Ukrainian choir, guest screams from JPEGMAFIA—the quality that defines it is one they’ve honed from the beginning: a restless, untameable curiosity, less set on conclusive wisdom than a pervading faith in the flailing.