Bleep

Michael Gira has moved Swans through many reincarnations in their four decade tenure. In 2025, he brings the band to the end of an era and the start of a new one in a “pared down form”, but not without one last deluge of their incomparable huge sound. Birthing is therefore a transitional record, torpedoing from avant garde abstractions of toiling guitar drones and ballistic information overload percussion, to hypnotic, rocking and rolling bass grooves. Gira chants punitive decrees amidst a vortex of swirling unease and celestial ambience on ‘The Healers’, and merges with the brilliant tangle of frantic zithers and elongated post rock shreds in the pure energy of ‘(Rope) Away’.