Songfacts®:

• "Taxes" is the lead single from Geese's fourth album, Getting Killed. It's equal parts stream-of-consciousness muttering and musical euphoria.
• As for what it's about, well, here's our best shot. "Taxes," in our reading, isn't about the IRS or VAT or any other torment invented by governments to keep accountants employed. It's a metaphor for the emotional debts we cling to but eventually must surrender, apologies we've avoided making, truths we've avoided hearing, or that final, begrudging moment of closure we'd rather store in a shoebox under the bed.
  
  When Cameron Winter howls, "Doctor, doctor, heal yourself... I will break my own heart from now on," perhaps the doctor, well-intentioned but bungling, does more harm than good, and Winter sees in that a reflection of his own romantic fumbles.
• The track sits at the crossroads of emo and folk. two genres with a longstanding commitment to narrating one's spiraling inner life with an acoustic instrument nearby. The production was handled collaboratively by the band and producer, Kenneth Blume, formerly known as Kenny Beats (Vince Staples, Idles), with recording taking place in January 2025 at Blume's Putnam Hill studio in LA.
• Geese were road-testing "Taxes" as early as August 2024, when they opened for King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard on the Boston stop of their world tour. By the time they performed it on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on October 1, 2025 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the song had fully matured into an intense, cathartic and powerful live blast.
• The music video, directed by Noel Paul, is essentially Saturday Night Live meets Dante's Inferno: the band perform to a ravenous, cannibalistic crowd.
  
  Paul said the idea of a frenzied club crowd came from Geese themselves; he merely embellished it with the visual vocabulary of medieval paintings of damned souls and tortured sinners, because who doesn't want a little Caravaggio in their indie rock? To keep it from feeling like a literal art-history lecture, they drastically undercranked the camera, making the footage whip by at such velocity that viewers have no time to ponder symbolism. It's all vibe, no mid-term exam.
• When Getting Killed arrived, critics practically flung bouquets. Both Stereogum and Amanda Petrusich at The New Yorker named it the Best Album of 2025, and many others ranked it in their Top 5.