Newly Sentient Being

SWANS

SWANS • NEWLY SENTIENT BEING • YG69

DUE TO UNFORESEEN PRODUCTION DELAYS, GATEFOLD VINYL ORDERS WILL SHIP MID-OCTOBER.

--INSERT SIGNED BY M.GIRA--

Unsigned copies available via Mute in the UK. 

Goodbye to this stellar version of Swans. Newly Sentient Being features superb recordings of Swans’ final concert of the “Big Sound” era, the apotheosis of 15 years of cosmic sonic expressionism, alternately heavenly and debased, visceral and transcendent. Recorded November 28, 2025, in Berlin. Over 2 ½ hours of music, includes a wealth of new material never recorded elsewhere and a DVD of the performance. Up there with the best of Swans’ legendary live records, they close this chapter with love and unbridled passion.

“In 2010 I made the decision to reconvene my band, Swans, which I had, years earlier, killed out of frustration, disappointment and exhaustion. Now, I saw a light, a way forward for the music, and I decided to pursue it. Neither I, nor my collaborators in sound had any idea how things would eventually unfold, but it felt necessary and right, so we followed the music where it led. Turns out there was and is an audience for our music, which is often less than accessible in the popular sense of the term, but proved to be nevertheless compelling to a growing cadre of folks seeking the kind of unique experience we have offered. I believe we reached some pretty tremendous highs along the way, where the music became a raging, sentient autonomous beast that played us (and the audience/listener), rather than the reverse. That was the goal all along, to lose ourselves in the swirl. It took a lot out of us, physically and psychically to reach the highest plateaus, but once there, there was nothing on earth like it, and I’m glad we did it. Now this phase is finished. There’s nowhere else to take it, but we seem to have ended on a particularly high note with our final tour of this (now passing) Swans era, and I believe these current recordings convey the sensations and experience of the unique world we forged. For the next phase, I’m moving Swans into something with a decidedly more humble and intimate musical palette, but here now I offer my praise to the righteous group of humans, the musicians that made our final foray into the sonic ether a reality: Norman Westberg, Dana Schechter, Phil Puleo, Larry Mullins, Kristof Hahn, Christopher Pravdica...and I was in there flailing somewhere too. “ - Michael Gira / Swans  

Newly Sentient Being songs (Approximately 2 1/2 hours of music):

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

• Limited Edition Boxset: 4LP + 2CD + DVD + Poster (Limited to 1000 copies)
• 4LP Vinyl Gatefold + DVD + Poster
• 2CD + DVD

DVD Trailer:

Video directed by Marco Porsia and Peter Harton.

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Boxset With All Components:

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18"x24" Vinyl Poster:

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CD Booklet Back:

Swans 2025: Schechter, Puleo, Hahn, Westberg, Pravdica, Mullins, Gira:

Newly Sentient Being Review: Smells Like Infinite Sadness

https://smellslikeinfinitesadness.com/swans-newly-sentient-being-review/

SWANS’ new live album, Newly Sentient Being (Oct. 2, Young God Records), is the monumental final document of the band’s “Big Sound” era, capturing a group at the apotheosis of 15 years of extreme sonic expressionism, where beauty and brutality, transcendence and debasement have maintained an uneasy alliance.

With only five songs stretched across more than two and a half hours, Newly Sentient Being is hardly a casual listen, but that is to be expected for a band as uncompromising as SWANS. It is a demanding but deeply rewarding immersion into the world Michael Gira and his collaborators have spent the last decade and a half constructing. Recorded November 28, 2025, at Berlin’s Festsaal Kreuzberg, it feels like the closing chapter to one of the most affecting musical journeys of recent memory.

Since Gira resurrected SWANS in 2010, the band has produced an extraordinary sequence of albums and performances that have, remarkably, come to rival and in some respects eclipse the group’s already legendary earlier work. That is a remarkable statement considering the singular ferocity of Swans’ original output. Yet the “Big Sound” era developed its own language: colossal repetition, glacial builds, orchestral volume and hypnotic rhythms, in which songs ceased to behave like conventional compositions and became environments to inhabit.

Newly Sentient Being is the final and most definitive document of that approach.

Three of the five pieces are new compositions, while “The Merge” and “Paradise Is Mine” originated on 2025’s Birthing and 2023’s The Beggar, respectively. As is SWANS’ modus operandi, these live renditions are not simply recreations of their studio counterparts. They mutate considerably, becoming longer, stranger and more volatile. The songs are less performed than subjected to the particular alchemy of the stage, where Gira’s band has rearranged the song’s innards while keeping the exoskeleton intact.

“The End of Forgetting” opens the album with a disorienting synthesizer introduction and a throbbing, heartbeat-like bass pulse. There is an almost dreamy atmosphere initially, conjuring strange wintry images as glacial lap steel gradually draws the listener into a trance. At around the 16-minute mark, however, the serenity begins to rot. Gira starts wailing as though speaking in tongues while ragged guitar distortion creeps into the mix and the drums become increasingly martial.

By the 18-minute mark, the tension erupts into a violent orgasm of clattering percussion and screaming sonics, at one point resembling the sustained shriek of a dental drill. The assault continues for several minutes before suddenly collapsing back into something more serene, though Gira’s bleating vocals prevent the calm from ever becoming entirely comforting. The song drifts into something resembling a sea shanty before dissolving into waves of volume swells and a seasick shoegaze dirge. It gradually builds again, only to finally disappear into a hush.

If “The End of Forgetting” establishes the album’s aquatic and elemental character, “The Merge” throws the listener directly into the undertow.

Beginning with a sinister bassline, clattering drums and a frenzied guitar riff that sounds like a bee buzzing angrily before delivering its inevitable sting, the song is an exercise in sustained distress. Another guitar seems to approximate the outcry that follows the sting. It is a patience tester, certainly, but that patience is precisely the point. Swans have always understood that anticipation can be as powerful as release, and the music reaches such urgent, escalating waves of angst that you can practically feel your blood pressure rising simply by listening.

After more than 13 minutes, the initial intensity finally subsides, giving way to a comparatively jazzy groove beneath Gira’s intimidating delivery. “BLACK WATER!” he bellows as scything guitars cut through the proceedings like razor blades before the entire performance erupts into a full-blown noise-rock seizure.

Then, almost perversely, it evaporates into a queasy sideways melody as Gira sings of a broken body being tied into a knot, thrown into water and drowned, continuing the aquatic lyrical imagery that permeates the album.

That theme isn’t incidental. Water, drowning, birth, death and transformation recur throughout the album, creating the sensation that the listener is being pulled to enormous subterranean depths. There is rarely solid ground.

“Paradise Is Mine,” is comparatively brief at under 15 minutes. It begins with strange, almost nonsensical vocalizations before slowly building an atmosphere of terror.  The performance is transfixing and knowing this is effectively the final live rendition of the song adds another layer of finality to the proceedings.

Then comes the album’s centerpiece and longest track. “Newly Sentient Being”, clocking in at almost an hour, is one of the most labyrinthine and harrowing compositions the band has ever performed.

Beginning with dulcimer, the song slowly develops into a swirling whirlpool of sound. The instrumentation creates an oceanic soundscape that seems to approximate a growing tidal wave, with ghostly choral voices hovering somewhere above the storm.

Around the midpoint, a relatively conventional, at least by SWANS standards, guitar riff and drum pattern emerges. It is lurching and sinister, but its comparatively recognizable structure only makes the surrounding chaos feel more unstable. The tension never relents. Instead, the song coils and uncoils like a snake enveloping its prey, gradually increasing in tempo and intensity until it resembles a frenzied occult ritual approaching its sacrificial stage.

A manic drum solo provides the violent climax before the music finally begins to ebb, evaporating into an aural vapor trail.

The final track, “The End of Regretting,” provides something resembling tranquility, although SWANS’ definition of tranquility remains considerably more ominous and fragile than most bands. Whispered vocals gradually become tauter as sounds resembling scurrying spider legs emerge from the mix. Near the end, a guitar lumbers into the picture like a chainsaw while another unidentified sound, one of many exotic instrumental textures scattered throughout the record, buzzes like an unrepentant mosquito. An Ennio Morricone-esque burst of harmonica eventually signals the song’s (and album’s) seismic conclusion. 

Gira’s goal for this incarnation was not simply to perform, but to allow the band (and the listener) to lose themselves inside the music, to inhabit its heady atmosphere, allowing volume, repetition, physical endurance and collective improvisational force to create something larger than the sum of its parts. And that intent is delivered tenfold on this release. 

There have been plenty of great live SWANS records, but Newly Sentient Being ranks alongside the band’s most essential. It captures the final performance of a particular group of musicians who spent 15 years developing one of the most overwhelming live experiences in contemporary music. Norman Westberg, Dana Schechter, Phil Puleo, Larry Mullins, Kristof Hahn, Christopher Pravdica and Gira himself didn’t simply provide accompaniment to these songs. They constructed the enormous musical organism Gira envisioned.

The four-vinyl set, accompanied by a DVD of the Berlin performance, gives this final concert the physical scale it deserves, and encapsulates what made this era so extraordinary.

Gira has said that there is nowhere else to take this particular incarnation of the group, and that the next phase will employ a “decidedly more humble and intimate musical palette.” The mind reels at the possibilities inherent in SWANS’ switching gears, but whatever that future brings, Newly Sentient Being stands as the ultimate monument to what came before.

Live Review: Swans at Festaal Kreuzberg, Berlin – 27 November 2025

http://beatsperminute.com/

John Wohlmacher · December 11, 2025

Swans are dead, again – at least in what could be their most renowned iteration. The multi-generational, legendary group that Michael Gira has led for over four decades as always prone to transformation, both in their member configuration and aesthetic expression. But the chapter Gira himself has deemed their “big sound era”, starting soon after their comeback in 2010 and finding their footing on 2012’s The Seer seems irreversibly closed. Gira himself has attributed this to the spiritual and physical limits introduced by the roughly 15 years of enveloping the project in deafening sound. That, and Gira is now 71, by all accounts has an infant son and a teenage daughter and, likely, deserves a breather from the ceaseless touring and recording schedule of that dominated his life and was only cut short by the lockdown and a painful accident thereafter.

So this is it: one last tour to send off this iteration of Swans, and then – something gentler and calmer, assumedly. For the occasion of the group’s swan song, Gira has chosen Berlin for a two-night farewell. The city is not only home to lap-steel guitar player Kristof Hahn, but also where most of the group’s recent output was recorded – and where the band found a massive, cross-generational fanbase. So it makes sense to finish things here, in the intimate, leisure Festsaal Kreuzberg (or its second iteration, after the original, legendary ballroom burned down many years ago). I was lucky to witness the first of the two nights.

Having seen Gira perform a few times solo and with Swans at the end of the Glowing Man tour, I am well aware that their reputation of being the loudest thing in live music is well earned and – given my own limitations thanks to constant front row placement – am seeking an overlook position right at the very top in the back – in a place so small all the more pleasant.

As the group took the stage, Gira quickly thanked the audience, and revealed his one request to the crowd: to not film the stage. As the group started to slowly sink into droning ambience, I took a deep breath and let the music carry me…

What followed were over two and a half hours of music, in total just five songs with an intensity and euphoric density that eclipsed that of the previous Gira-led shows I witnessed! In emotional intensity, the concert was often closer to a tribal ritual than musical expression usually allows. Had you been there, you would have likely watched me wildly dance and shake about – to me, it seemed impossible to take the music without such wild movements (a large number of audience members on the back platforms seemed to agree). I had seen Swans before, this time was different. There was no sudden break in the music to allow Gira to berate audience members, no annoying drunks, just pure concentration on and off stage.

“The End of Forgetting” opened the concert with a slow, steady drone that built itself up into a slow groove of sleigh-bell infused Americana, over which Gira’s voice towered like a Western character. Then, introducing a snare-led marching rhythm that continued to become faster and faster, the section finally climaxed in a maelstrom of guitar noise and ceaseless, crushing staccato drumming, which pulsed in itself. Drummer Phil Puleo immediately introduced himself as invaluable with this track, his drumming of an unimaginable precision and dynamic. 

The onslaught continued for about five minutes, at some point so intense it seemed impossible to take, but constantly pushed the audience further into its spiralling madness, before it suddenly broke down, allowing Gira to sing a solemn folk section, to lead to the main movement of the song, where the band joined him. Gira over and over repeated: “Begin again, begin again…”, finally sinking into an Ennio Morricone-type composition. A beautiful, immense beast, “The End of Forgetting” is one of two new compositions Gira brought to the tour – hard to imagine it could possibly be contained in a studio. After roughly 35 minutes, the journey ended in a euphoric climactic expression of power, and moved to the only track off Birthing the band picked: “The Merge”.

Cutting the introductory noise collage, the band immediately dived into the crushing rhythm part of Puleo and twin bass-parts of Chris Pravdica and Dana Schechter. Their riff is nothing short of evil, with a tone that is outright diabolical. While both sunk into the groove, Gira got up from his usual sitting position to conduct Puleo and percussionist Larry Mullins with his arms.

Quickly, the frontman caught an audience member filming, and – without the band breaking off – ordered him inaudibly to put it away, sliding his finger across his throat. 
As intensity built, Gira transformed into a shaman, swinging his arms about, ordering Hahn to enter with the lap steel, then signaling to formative guitarist Norman Westberg to enter with his crushing, swirling, industrial guitar tone. “The Merge” interrupted into the blind joy of repetition, as the audience went along, dancing wildly, as Gira stared into the upper lights, shaking. For a long time, I lost myself in the dance, as the guitar tones started swirling and jabbing over the incessant, complex rhythm – when I next looked at the stage, Gira had picked up his acoustic guitar, swinging it like a weapon over the heads of the front rows, pointing and seemingly swearing at the dancers over the almost unbearably intense noise: a mad, wild god! And of the two and a half hours, we just crossed the 45 minute mark!

The jazzy, second section that followed dived into the territory of early Pink Floyd, ca. “Set the Controls to the Heart of the Sun”, with Mullins providing synthesiser layers to the charismatic drumming, while Westberg, Hahn and Schechter’s additional lap steel indulged in psychedelia. If anything, the track proved the immense value of Gira as storyteller, as the band crafted a basis for his teutonic vocals. The closing section moved even closer to the late 60s, returning the dual bass as central focus and adding occasional echo to the drums, allowing once more for the same deep, mystical feeling of early Floyd shows. All the while, Gira hunkered down, gesticulating forward, as if controlling the tides of a massive ocean. When, after the spoken word section, Hahn and Westberg finally joined in, the proximity to Velvet Underground seemed impossible to miss.

Seventy minutes into the show, The Beggar track “Paradise is Mine” felt almost short at about 12 minutes in length. If there was such a thing as a “breather” moment at this concert: this was likely it. Harbouring the gloomy, ghost-town atmosphere of an early Godspeed track, the song allowed the band a classic post-rock dynamic of slow build-up to a heavy finish. It was a brief moment of relaxation, as the song could be followed from point A to B with no further complexities or complications, and after finishing, Gira allowed himself a brief yodel to the audience… 

…It’s hard to describe this (final) new track, deemed “Newly Sentient Being”, fully – the song created a world and dynamic all of its own, at times feeling more like a conceptual narrative work, a short story or film. Here, the band fully immersed themselves into a multitude of atmospheric and sonic effects right off the gate, once more returning to what is likely Gira’s formative influences of psychedelic 60s rock music. The crushing buildup that followed had Gira drive Puelo to full free jazz territory, as his drumming was as precise as it was seemingly unstable, skidding purposefully and finding sudden flaws in the structure, just to close them again. 
Once this part was finished, the band broke into a haunting, electronic backdrop, embodying cosmic or oceanic depths. From there, Gira started a wave-like movement with his body, which had the band ebb and rise, again and again, over and over, until he turned and extended this movement to the audience.

As Gira returned to the role of storyteller – reflecting on the cosmos creation itself – the band added strange, incidental wooden sounds and hovering guitar notes. Pink Floyd’s never-studio recorded live-show “The Massed Gadgets of Anaximenes” came to mind, where the group explored the human routine in contrast to spiritual powers and the elemental nature of the cosmos. Then, the guitars and drums cut in, almost reminding of certain gothic post-punk bands like Fields of the Nephilim or Bauhaus. 
All the while the band continued the swirling backdrop, before diverting into a sharp punk section, somewhere between Pink Floyd and Public Image Ltd. It is inescapably brilliant, like a perfection of what Syd Barrett was thriving for with “Astronomy Domine”, or a more brutalist “The National Anthem” off Kid A. Becoming louder and louder, this section is like nothing in Swans’ canon so far and – while being in its presence – truly feels as if the band has found a moment where their entire body of work folds in on itself. When it finally ended, with Puelo and Mullens drumming a marching rhythm on their snares, the song seemed to have reached its conclusion – but Gira drove it on still, shifting the track into solemn, cosmic Americana. Aided by swirling guitar tones and Pravda’s expressive bass, the song almost drifted into full-on ambient, expressing a forlorn, longing sadness. As Gira returned to vocals, the image of great plains and blood-soaked sand seemed inevitable. “There is light”, he sand, then lifted a harmonica and started playing.

It was a moment of immense grace. At this point, it seemed as if time itself only existed to mark the inevitability of this concert ending, yet Gira continued, started whistling the lead melody, a lone man in the shadow of eternity.

It is in these final moments of the song that it became inevitable to argue that this final tour might be Swans’ best yet, as Gira lifted himself and, almost drunkenly, mouthed quietly along to the track, “Bah bah bah… thereeeeeeeeeee…” At 71, he seemed all the more conscious of his age for a second, and then, suddenly, the track drifted into echoing dub. Quietly, strangely, Swans ended the show. In one final ironic twist, Gira asked for the lights to be turned on – and immediately regretted it: “Argh… not on me, the audience”, he grumbled, as he tried to shield himself from the brightness. A man that, for all his career, has asked for this moment of discomfort and shock, to strangle and bludgeon the rooms he inhabits during his shows to – at the finale – be blinded into submission by the stage lights, is almost poetic. As the crowd erupted, Gira gave it one deep, long bow, waving goodbye.

This might not be the end of Swans – in fact, Gira has already confirmed that, after a year-long break, the band will return, albeit in a new, “stripped down” form, which needs to still determine itself. But it is a farewell to this entity of unbelievable, violent grace. And honestly, judging from this show, it might be a goodbye at their very best – the closest many in the room will ever come to an experience of seeing early Velvet Underground or Pink Floyd or Miles Davis: pure elysium! Uncaringly, the night rolled in, as Swans exited the stage.