Live Shows: Geese | Phoenix, AZ
Phoenix, AZ - Crescent Ballroom - November 1, 2025
On Sunday, November 1st there were plenty of reasons to be excited. For sports fans, there was a historic Game 7 of the Baseball World Series to determine the 2025 World Champions. For concertgoers, Brooklyn’s post-punk outfit Geese were set to detonate like a bomb when they would take the stage at Crescent Ballroom. We had no idea that Geese’s explosive Phoenix performance on their Getting Killed Tour would turn the night into a rare moment where the worlds of sports and music collided.
Geese has been the most talked about band of 2025 and somehow I found myself at their SOLD OUT face melting, body levitating and mind blowing performance. I was one of roughly 500 people in attendance. There was something rejuvenating about looking around and seeing happy and excited faces floating around me, astonishment surrounded me, there was disbelief that we were fortunate enough to be in this small room. The setting was unbelievably intimate, all of us crowded like sardines looking over each other’s shoulders to catch a glimpse of the various phone screens livestreaming the final game of the world series.
In the final minutes of the game, there was a sense of conflict among the crowd over the potential of missing out on sports history as soon as the band walked up on stage. What we got instead was far more cinematic. The game ended, lights dimmed immediately, and the crowd erupted with excitement because the timing of it all could not have been any more perfectly executed. All of us were stunned at the fact that we had just witnessed sports history and would be graced by the presence of Geese in mere seconds. Lead vocalist/guitarist was quick to acknowledge the moment by cracking a joke about them being the most punctual band in the industry followed by the confession that they were also watching the game in the green room. The room erupted again, and appropriate reaction to how big the moment felt, we felt an immediate sense of comradery with the band.
It’s impossible to predict what Geese will do at any given moment, I thought they would start their set off with the first track off their recently released and critically acclaimed album Getting Killed, but instead would give us a warm up with “Husbands” a song whose lyrics us a horse on someone’s back as a symbol of carrying a burden. I heard the crowd singing back ambiguous lyrics all night long, it’s this unique songwriting style that sets Geese apart, they sing about modern day anxieties, nightmarish scenarios and surreal chaos. The experience of seeing them in person was a perfect embodiment of all of these elements. I felt like I was floating on open water, their setlist was perfectly constructed to mimic the unpredictable behaviors of the ocean. Waves of people would crash around me during their more chaotic tracks like “Getting Killed”, “100 Horses” and “2122”. During their more laid back songs “Islands of Men”, “Au Pays de Cocaine” and “Half Real” I was able to calmly swim through the crowd to get some different perspective shots and soak in the energy around me.
The final song of the night erupted into a chaotic spectacle, it was the moment everything built toward when they played their experimental and unhinged track “Trinidad”. On Getting Killed, it opens the album like a warning siren, but here, it was the perfect closing detonation. I will never forget Cameron Winter screaming at the crowd “THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR!!!” as strangers shouted it back in manic unison. It was a symphony of beautiful disorder that is still echoing in my mind.
