From the album Projector
This is a song about trying to surgically remove shame and finding out the cut itself becomes another secret. The speaker claims they've excised whatever made them wrong, but the very next line admits the fantasies are still there, just hidden now. The knife didn't fix anything. It just proved the problem can't be solved by violence against the self.
I put steel in human skin / I kissed the face of a new machine / He died on the head of a pin
The language lurches between clinical violence and intimate contact without warning. Putting steel in skin sounds like surgery or self-harm, kissing a machine sounds like desire for something inhuman, and someone dying on a pinhead might be religious imagery or just impossible smallness. The speaker isn't explaining these images because they don't fully understand them either.
Wickedness lives in the city / And every shape, another killer in disguise
The speaker spent a day and night outside, supposedly escaping urban threat, but they're still narrating in full paranoia mode. The wickedness isn't actually in the city. It's in how they see the world. Leaving doesn't help when you bring the fear with you.
Sleeping in the middle of a drum, I see you / And my house stays alive / Now and forever
This might be the cleanest image of the speaker's actual problem: they're inside something that won't stop vibrating. A drum is a trap that amplifies noise. The house staying alive forever isn't comfort, it's a curse. They can't leave because the structure itself won't die.
I put myself under the knife / I cut out what makes me this way / You hold the pearls in your shaking hand / Don't you ever show them your fantasies
The cutting is past tense but the instruction to hide is present tense, which means the surgery failed. The pearls could be something precious or just something you're white-knuckling to keep from spilling. Either way, the fantasies survived the knife. The speaker doesn't realize that trying to cut out desire is itself a fantasy of self-transformation.
[Part 2: Survival] / [Instrumental]
The second half is just called 'Survival' and it's wordless. That might be the most honest thing in the song. After all that self-surgery and paranoia, survival isn't a narrative. It's just continuing without explanation.
The song ends by dropping language entirely and calling it survival. After trying to cut out the problem, flee the city, and hide what remains, the only honest move left is instrumental silence. The fantasies didn't go anywhere. The knife just gave them a scar to hide behind.
"Fantasies / Survival" by Geese depicts an attempt to surgically remove shame that backfires, as the speaker claims to have excised their wrongness only to immediately reveal the fantasies persist, merely hidden now. In Scalpel's line-by-line reading, the song shows how self-directed violence doesn't solve the underlying problem but instead creates another secret to carry, proving the wound itself becomes part of what needs concealing.
"Fantasies / Survival" by Geese explores surgery that doesn't take, the city as projection, loving machines over people, and death that makes no sense. The central thread is surgery that doesn't take: The speaker puts themselves under the knife to remove the wrong thing inside them, but immediately after, the fantasies are still there and just need hiding. These themes come from Scalpel's line-by-line analysis of the lyrics.
"Fantasies / Survival" by Geese was released on October 29, 2021 on the album "Projector". Scalpel's analysis covers the full lyrics of the 2021 release.
Scalpel's line-by-line analysis of "Fantasies / Survival" by Geese lands here: The song ends by dropping language entirely and calling it survival. After trying to cut out the problem, flee the city, and hide what remains, the only honest move left is instrumental silence.