Swans - The Beggar

Swans' 16th studio album is due to be released on the 23rd June through Michael Gira's Young God Records.

The singles:

One day I will summon the effort to get into this band......

  On 6/14/2023 at 10:54 PM, beerwolf said:

One day I will summon the effort to get into this band......

It's well worth it. This may get shot down by another user but I'd suggest: Soundtracks for the Blind, White Light from the Mouth of Infinity, and Filth as starting points.

I feel lucky to have seen them multiple times through the reformation. I don't see how they can top that run from 2010-2016.

I would name Swans as one of my favorite bands in any given day (in particular that 87-95 period), but admittedly I don't listen to much non-electronic music anymore, so I lost track of their records after To Be Kind – I also saw them for the first time in that year, it was a thing of noisy beauty but also made me think this reformation era is really all about the live setting.

So in the current tour they came back to my city and I had little doubts about going, even if unprepared... and again, it was worth every cent. It's an interesting lineup, the current one: no electric guitars anymore, but the bass is louder than ever, and there's more lap guitar and mellotron layers, so I felt a more pronounced southern gothic vibe along those walls of sound. Can't go wrong with that.

I'm super stoked for this album, especially as Ben Frost worked on it with them.  He guested on a track on the Leaving Meaning album but now appears to have more of a pivotal role.  

I even intend to go to an actual record shop to buy this!

Went to see them play live yesterday. It was really great!