The Swans definitively close the “Big Sound” era with “Newly Sentient Being”, a monumental live album that documents the last concert of the formation protagonist of the phase that began with the re-foundation of the American group in 2010. The album will be released on October 2, 2026 by Mute and Young God Records in North America.
The record
Recorded in Berlin on November 28, 2025, “Newly Sentient Being” photographs the final act of fifteen of the most intense and radical years in the history of Michael Gira's band. On stage, next to the leader, there were Kristof Hahn, Dana Schechter, Larry Mullins, Phil Puleo, Christopher Pravdica and Norman Westberg: the formation that accompanied the Swans in the last part of a journey based on extreme volumes, temporal dilations, improvisation and an almost physical and ritual conception of performance.
The Berlin concert exceeds two and a half hours in duration despite including just five compositions: “The End Of Forgetting”, “The Merge”, “Paradise Is Mine”, “Newly Sentient Being” and “The End Of Regretting”. The recordings also contain previously unreleased material and return that dimension of trance collective that over the last fifteen years has become one of the hallmarks of Swans live. Beats Per Minute magazine, reviewing that evening, described the show as an experience whose emotional intensity was closer to a “tribal ritual” than a normal musical performance.
“Newly Sentient Being” will be released in an edition of four vinyls with DVD and poster, as a double CD with DVD and booklet gatefold and in digital format. The DVD, directed by Marco Porsia and Peter Harton, contains the entire performance of Berlin.
The album represents above all the epilogue of the second great life of the Swans. “In 2010 I decided to reunite my band, the Swans, which I had killed years earlier out of frustration, disappointment and exhaustion,” says Gira, retracing the genesis of this long phase. “I saw a light, a path for music to follow, and I decided to follow it.” From that choice was born one of the most celebrated seasons in the group's history, punctuated by albums such as “The Seer”, “To Be Kind” and “The Glowing Man” and by concerts in which the compositions were continually dismantled, expanded and reconstructed. The goal, according to Gira, was to get to the point where the music seemed to take on a life of its own: “I think along the way we reached truly remarkable heights, where the music became a furious, sentient, autonomous beast that played to us (and the audience/listener), rather than the other way around. That was always the goal: to lose ourselves in the vortex.”
The performance
Now that search has reached its natural limit. “This phase is over. There's nowhere else to take it, but I feel like we ended on a particularly high note with the last tour of this bygone Swans era, and I think these recordings convey the feeling and experience of the unique world we created.”
Below is a video extract from performance.
Gira also wanted to pay homage to the musicians who shared this latest adventure with him: “For the next phase I'm taking Swans towards something with a decidedly more humble and intimate musical palette, but now I want to pay homage to this magnificent group of human beings, the musicians who made our latest foray into the sonic ether a reality: Norman Westberg, Dana Schechter, Phil Puleo, Larry Mullins, Kristof Hahn, Christopher Pravdica, and somewhere I was stirring too.”
“Newly Sentient Being” arrives after “Birthing”, Swans' seventeenth studio album, released in May 2025 and followed by the European and British tour in the autumn. Precisely the Berlin date of November 28th represented the point of arrival of that cycle and, more generally, of the imposing sound architecture built by Gira after the resurrection of the group in 2010. The new live show thus becomes not only the final testimony, but a sort of epitaph: the last photograph of the gigantic sound machine of the Swans before the announced transition towards a more intimate and intimate dimension.
The tracklist
Here it is tracklist of “Newly Sentient Being”:
- The End Of Forgetting
- The Merge
- Paradise Is Mine
- Newly Sentient Being
- The End Of Regretting
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
