Disco

There's something restlessly alive in Geese's "Disco" — a coiled tension that never quite resolves into the release the title implies. Built on interlocking guitar lines that clatter and skitter like a typewriter left running, the track moves with the jittery urgency of someone pacing a small room. The production is raw but deliberate, layering a rhythm section that pushes forward insistently while the guitars work at cross-purposes, pulling apart and snapping back. Frontman Cameron Winter delivers his vocals with a kind of hyper-articulate anxiety, the words tumbling out as though the act of speaking is itself a compulsion — too fast, too precise, catching on itself. The song doesn't really celebrate anything; instead it examines the performance of celebration, the hollow mechanics of moving bodies in a room. It fits squarely in the lineage of post-punk that treats dance music as a site of existential unease — Wire, Television, the early Talking Heads — but filtered through a distinctly millennial sensibility, aware of its own ironies. Geese were teenagers when they recorded "Projector," and that youth shows not as naivety but as a kind of anxious intelligence that hasn't yet learned to protect itself. You reach for this song when your thoughts are moving faster than your body can keep up.