Swans: “Newly Sentient Being”, the definitive live album of the "Big Sound" era, is coming – Video

Swans are definitively closing the “Big Sound” era with “Newly Sentient Being”, a monumental live album documenting the final concert of the lineup that defined the phase inaugurated by the American band's rebirth in 2010. The record will be released on October 2, 2026 via Mute, and Young God Records in North America.

The record

Recorded in Berlin on November 28, 2025, “Newly Sentient Being” captures the closing act of fifteen of the most intense and radical years in the history of Michael Gira's band. On stage alongside the leader were Kristof Hahn, Dana Schechter, Larry Mullins, Phil Puleo, Christopher Pravdica and Norman Westberg: the lineup that accompanied Swans through the final stretch of a journey built on extreme volumes, temporal dilation, improvisation and an almost physical, ritualistic conception of performance.
The Berlin concert runs over two and a half hours despite containing just five compositions: “The End Of Forgetting”, “The Merge”, “Paradise Is Mine”, “Newly Sentient Being” and “The End Of Regretting”. The recordings also include previously unreleased material and convey that dimension of collective trance that has become one of the defining traits of Swans' live shows over the last fifteen years. Reviewing that night, Beats Per Minute described the show as an experience whose emotional intensity felt closer to a “tribal ritual” than to a conventional musical performance.

“Newly Sentient Being” will be released as a four-LP edition with DVD and poster, as a double CD with DVD and gatefold booklet, and digitally. The DVD, directed by Marco Porsia and Peter Harton, contains the entire Berlin performance.
Above all, the record represents the epilogue of Swans' second great life. “In 2010 I decided to reunite my band, Swans, which years earlier I had killed out of frustration, disappointment and exhaustion”, Gira recalls, retracing the genesis of this long chapter. “I saw a light, a path to follow for the music, and I decided to walk it”. That choice gave rise to one of the most celebrated seasons in the band's history, marked by albums such as “The Seer“, “To Be Kind” and “The Glowing Man”, and by concerts in which the compositions were continually taken apart, stretched out and rebuilt. According to Gira, the goal was to reach the point where the music seemed to take on a life of its own: “I think along the way we reached some truly remarkable peaks, where the music became a furious, sentient, autonomous beast that played us (and the audience/listener), rather than the other way around. That has always been the goal: to lose ourselves in the vortex”.

The performance

Now that pursuit has reached its natural limit. “This phase is over. There's nowhere else to take it, but it feels to me like we've reached the conclusion on a particularly high note with the final tour of this now-past era of Swans, and I believe these recordings convey the feelings and the experience of the singular world we created”.
Below is a video excerpt from the performance.

Gira also wanted to pay tribute to the musicians who shared this last adventure with him: “For the next phase I'm steering Swans toward something with a decidedly more humble and intimate musical palette, but for now I want to pay tribute to this magnificent group of human beings, the musicians who made our last foray into the sonic ether a reality: Norman Westberg, Dana Schechter, Phil Puleo, Larry Mullins, Kristof Hahn, Christopher Pravdica, and somewhere in there was me too, flailing about”.
“Newly Sentient Being” follows “Birthing“, the seventeenth studio album by Swans, released in May 2025 and followed in the autumn by a European and UK tour. That Berlin date on November 28 marked the endpoint of that cycle and, more broadly, of the towering sonic architecture Gira built after the band's resurrection in 2010. The new live album thus becomes not just its final testimony, but a kind of epitaph: the last snapshot of Swans' colossal sound machine before its announced shift toward a more restrained, intimate dimension.

The Tracklist

Here's the tracklist for "Newly Sentient Being":

1. The End Of Forgetting
2. The Merge
3. Paradise Is Mine
4. Newly Sentient Being
5. The End Of Regretting

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google