(Credits: Tim Nagle / Geese)
Thu 15 January 2026 2:00, UK
As ever, it’s never easy to untangle Geese’s cryptic lyricism.
But fans wouldn’t want them any other way. A major allure of Geese’s hectic, ramshackle energy is frontman Cameron Winter’s suitably collaged songwriting, expertly unleashing a poetic splatter across their disparate canvass. Throwing hints and clues like chum to water, hardcore fans can spend an inordinate time and attention pouring over Winter’s surrealist diary confessionals, a strange balancing act of painful honesty and artful misdirection.
‘100 Horses’ offered fans plenty to chew on. The third single from Getting Killed – Far Out’s top album of 2025 – presented a completely inside-out take on rootsy blues rock. Bristling with jumpy and shifty energy, ‘100 Horses’ feels coaxed from Beggars Banquet or Let It Bleed, charged with The Rolling Stones’ golden era air when the entire studio feels teeming with a whole cast of characters beyond just the band. There’s a busy mob hanging out with Geese in Los Angeles’ Putnam Hill studios, some weird aura spiking ‘100 Horses’ nervy swagger with a deliriously crowded galumph that only Geese can crumple into something coherent.
Such busy bluster illustrates Winters’ apocalyptic visions. Bottling the political febrility hanging in the air, ‘100 Horses’ adds an extra 96 on top of Aphrodite’s Child’s biblical stallions for a Boschian whirlwind of ruined terrain serving both as battleground and dancefloor, imploring a cynical smile and nihilistic boogie in the gargantuan face of political collapse and end times capitalism. What’s a Gen Z kid to do? Faced with a bleak economic future and right-wing cultural grip, may as well live for the moment and take sanctuary in the immediate pleasures of today.
For whatever reason, Winter imposes himself, or some alter-ego, in the midst of the unfolding conflict between two generals by the name of Smith and Adam, the former telling the shellshocked protagonist “…I would never smile again, but not to worry / For all people must stop smiling once they get what they’ve been begging for,” and the latter informing “…one day you will die scared, but not to worry for all people must die scared or else just die nervous.”
Just exactly who these high-ranking officers are sits in Geese’ confounding songbook as another knot in their mysterious body of work.
So, who is General Smith?
Of course, there’s not going to be any easy answers.
General Adams has been posited by fans to simply illustrate US heritage and its political institutions. Adams was a common surname around the time of the Founding Fathers and the revolutionary generals, forming a major political dynasty with the second US president, John Adams, and his son, as the sixth president, John Quincy Adams. Is Winter talking to America’s mythos and strained narratives?
Then there’s General Smith. It can’t be certain, but a theory that Winter has woven in Scottish economic theorist Adam Smith into ‘100 Horses’ historic vignette is an intriguing one. Considered ‘the father of capitalism’ and pioneering the principles of classical free-market mechanics, what better way to vent your alienation with the neoliberal hellscape than summoning the spirit of Smith against a backdrop of the capitalist excess he had cautioned against over 200 years ago?
Perhaps we’re getting ahead of ourselves, but such lyrical nuggets are all part of Geese’s evocative magic, clamouring for answers among the simplest lines but only unearthing more questions.
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