Music | Swans: Far from what a song is

Swans live in Malmö 2024 Photo: IMAGO / Gonzales Photo Farewell is a sharp sword, and Michael Gira has been dragging his own for about 30 years now. The Swans' first last tour took place in 1997, when I saw them at the Bremen slaughterhouse. The third concert I've ever been to and I didn't think such volume was possible. It was documented two years later on the live album “Swans Are Dead”, the first farewell album. At the end of the 1990s, Gira and his seven-member band stretched out pieces, especially from the then final "Soundtracks for the Blind" album, one of the most depressing in the band's catalog.

Of all the men of sorrow in the global underground, Gira was and is one of the most consistent and pathos-filled. Completely untouched by any musical development outside of their own sound universe, the Swans piled up layer after layer of noise, repeatedly interrupted by fragile, floating passages.

Completely untouched by any musical development outside of their own sound universe, the Swans piled up layer after layer of noise.

The "We'll beat you all up now" attitude of the early days diminished over the years - with a detour to beautifully hybrid, alienating industrial dream pop on the albums "Love of Life" and "White Light from the Mouth of Infinity". The Swans started by thinking ambient, folk and noise together. An ambivalently shimmering sound structure that Michael Gira once defined as follows: “Swans are these beautiful animals that are in reality completely disgusting. They are hideous creatures.”

In 2010 the band continued with a completely new line-up and an album with the beautiful title “My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky”. There were one or two band breakups and farewells, but these were only short interruptions. Over the last fifteen years, Gira has acted more and more like an architect as a composer, in the studio and as a performatively tyrannical conductor at concerts. The pieces are no longer songs, but rather structures.

The album of the week. Further texts at dasnd.de/ Plattenbau

The now released final live album “Newly Sentient Being” documents the last concert of the current line-up on November 28, 2025 in the Berlin Festsaal Kreuzberg. Five pieces, another one, “A Little God in My Hands,” were played live at the time, but didn’t make it onto the album. The first two, “The End of Forgetting” and “The Merge,” are 40 minutes each, while the title track lasts just under an hour. You can't listen to it casually, you have to get involved with the endless repetitions and breaks. The Swans haven't been further away from the song form yet. Music as a meditative whirlpool in which Gira's singing, the most sonorous voice in the world, fits in not as a frontman's tone, but as another timbre.

When the band lets it rip, it still crashes powerfully and persistently. The massiveness here comes less from overpowering but from stoic repetition. In the pieces, motifs from the last albums are taken up, flow into one another and are expanded without falling apart. The guitars keep playing shimmering melodies, every change opens up a new horizon, held together by drums and a bass that starts out almost dubby in some passages. A worthy, monumental conclusion. Until the next reunion in probably six months.

With us, no one has to pay to be informed. Sounds like a bad business model? It is too. But independent journalism and participation for everyone are more important to us than profit. Journalism still costs money: research, printing and all the people who do it. That's why we depend on you. We need 300,000 euros by the end of the year.

Donate once or regularly, every amount counts. So that nd remains.