Swans

(This article’s English version was produced with AI-assisted translation)

Two years ago, “The Beggar”—especially in tracks like “No More Of This” and “Michael Is Done”—seemed to herald the farewell of Swans after a glorious career spanning more than four decades. Fortunately, Michael Gira’s creative fire still has a few sparks left to burn, and the title of his new work sounds like a rebirth, a renewed will to live in the face of the trauma such an ending would entail. The heart of “The Beggar” turned into a black hole (though not entirely black, on closer inspection), a sign of death but also of a new existence waiting to emerge.

“Birthing”, the seventeenth studio album by the legendary New York band, is once again a colossal work: an hour and fifty-five minutes divided into just seven tracks, five of which stretch between fifteen and twenty-two minutes—more or less what one expects from Swans. “Birthing” is something of a synthesis of what Swans have done over the last thirty years, a summing-up of Gira’s many ideas, from shamanic chanting to poetic lyrics, from obsessive repetition to pounding rhythms, alternating with long stretches of stasis—what Gira has recently described in interviews as “big sound,” which we used to call monster tracks.

“Birthing” often feels like a return to “The Seer”, as is especially clear in the title track, which—at least for its first ten minutes—feels ripped straight from that unforgettable album. In its second half, it echoes a less harrowing version of the classic two-chord repetition of “Bring The Sun” or “The Glowing Man”, before morphing into an almost psychedelic, dreamlike chant that culminates in a pounding finale. Nothing Swans haven’t done before—but everything is perfectly executed, and it couldn’t, and shouldn’t, have been any other way.

The real “big sound” piece is “The Healers”, long tested in recent solo shows, which showcases Gira’s trademark hypnotic, shamanic power. Just two notes on an acoustic guitar, a lap steel drone in the background, a female choir, and Gira’s commanding voice rising like a monolith for the first seven minutes, before the full band kicks in, aiming for yet another monster track with a delirious finale (again echoing “The Seer”) that, live, promises pure noise ecstasy.

There are even some echoes of the '90s in “The Merge”, with its frenetic electronics that seem to spill straight out of the more experimental tracks on the 1997 masterpiece “Soundtracks for the Blind”. The overwhelming force that (magnificently, in my opinion) spiraled out of control in the most intense albums of the monster trilogy is here kept in check, constantly balanced with moments of (albeit restless) stillness—like “(Rope) Away”, a shortened version of the track “Rope” (thirty-one breathtaking minutes) that opened all of Swans’ 2024 shows and is available on the “Live Rope” CD from the same year. This “short” version—if you can call nineteen minutes short—is pure ecstasy, a true rebirth shaped by the post-rock and dreamlike-psychedelic textures typical of Christoph Hahn’s and Norman Westberg’s guitars.

Gira manages to surprise us further with the first single, “I Am A Tower”, which—after a long introductory build-up—launches into a distinctively new wave groove around the thirteenth minute, recalling David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy, especially “Heroes”, with guitar work clearly nodding to Robert Fripp. Swans become singable, even danceable—for a few fleeting minutes, at least. If that’s not a rebirth, what is?

11/06/2025