Swans’ Birthing isn’t so much music as a reaction against music—a disavowal of melody, pleasure, and your nervous system’s comfort threshold.
Birthing is the latest sonic crucifixion from Swans, Michael Gira‘s relentless sound monolith that has been bludgeoning listeners since Ronald Reagan was president. From the first convulsion of sound, Birthing, like any Swans record, isn’t so much music as a reaction against music—a disavowal of melody, pleasure, and your nervous system’s comfort threshold. If forgotten gods had nightmares, then Birthing would be the unfiltered confession, a raw transmission hammered out on time’s fractured skull by some cosmic shaman whose every strike reassembles the very voice it’s trying to speak.
What you hear on Birthing—and let’s go ahead and agree to use the word “hear” loosely, since a Swans records entails less listening than being subjected to—is the final form (though “final” feels inaccurate for reasons we’ll get to) of material that began as something faintly resembling songs. Picture this: Gira alone, acoustic in hand, hunched in what one imagines as a kind of grim devotional posture, plucking out skeletal sketches. These fragments then underwent a kind of slow-motion detonation across a year’s worth of shows, mutating nightly under the twin pressures of stage light and reverb. What emerged, what finally made it to the album, feels less recorded than captured, sonic organisms documented mid-molt.
Gira doesn’t really “compose” music in the traditional sense of a solitary genius transcribing some distilled inner essence into legible form. What he does is more akin to midwifery or excavation, extracting something already there but buried, dormant, unwilling, or unable to speak in a register that anyone could initially recognize as music per se. At some point, the song emerges, talks back, and asserts itself. The song stops being his and becomes its own.
Imagine the kind of fiction writer who flat-out refuses to outline a plot, not out of laziness or some misguided allegiance to spontaneity, but because deep down they know that the characters are going to hijack the whole thing anyway, dragging it into back alleys and burning the map. That, more or less, is how Gira approaches songwriting. Songs are not as authored objects but as semi-autonomous beings, full of their own obscure logics, somehow smarter than their creator.
Birthing doesn’t feature songs built around the usual verse-chorus-bridge scaffolding; they’re more like sprawling, post-human epics, compositions so long-form they loop back and start interrogating the idea of form itself. Take “The Healers”, the opener, clocking in just short of twenty-two minutes. The song lures you with a kind of scorched-Earth grace and then obliterates with currents of noise and grandeur so absolute it short-circuits your critical faculties. One moment you’re a wreck, face hidden; the next, your teeth hum with raw, electric fury. Halfway through, the track becomes another song, as though the tune grew bored with itself mid-transmission and hit reboot, a classic Swans move.
“I Am a Tower”, which trails close behind in the endurance test at 19 minutes, unfolds like a seismic sermon, churning like buried machinery. Gira’s vocals recall Jim Morrison if he’d relocated to a Scandinavian fallout shelter to write monologues addressed to dead planets. Gira’s all incantation until, quite suddenly, there’s this inexplicable pivot—tranquil, even vaguely hopeful in a Berlin-era David Bowie kind of way—before the song swerves again into something more necrotic, and that’s the point. With a Swans record, the only throughline is instability.
By the time you reach the title track or “Guardian Spirit” or “The Merge”, you’re swimming in a black tide of horror-film guitar chords, caustic sludge textures, and Gira’s voice doing that thing where he doesn’t so much sing as prophesy collapse. Somewhere in the middle of it all, you start to believe that Birthing isn’t an album, but a field recording from the epicenter of some great disaster, the kind of document future civilizations will dig up and say, “Yes, here’s when they knew it was ending.”
Gira has declared, with the kind of solemn, almost theatrical finality you might expect from someone symbolically setting fire to the temple he has spent decades building, that Birthing marks the end of an era, the final installment of Swans as ego-annihilating drone cathedral. That wasn’t some offhand comment either; the decision apparently crystallized for him in the fugue-state aftermath of the last tour.
Now 71, and somehow still constructing albums that feel as though broadcast from inside a collapsing star, Gira has framed Birthing as his last descent into that particular mode of artistic totality he’s been circling for decades as a demigod of decay. After this tour, he says, “Swans will continue, so long as I’m able”, but in a “significantly pared down form”, which could mean anything, but will almost certainly still sound like the inside of a haunted steel mill.
Of course, the fanbase, the grizzled disciples, are already canonizing Birthing as a spiritual sequel to 1996’s Soundtracks for the Blind. Not just because of the music’s haunted sprawl, but because the artwork itself echoes that earlier monument: another black hole framed in a circle, another visual koan that says everything and nothing.
Birthing carries Swans’ heaviest weight in years, a relentless pull toward either epiphany or collapse. It’s not an album you listen to so much as one you submit to, like an exorcism. Like every Swans record, this one’s about stamina. Gira doesn’t care if you enjoy the LP. Enjoyment is beside the point, maybe even a moral failing. What he wants, demands, is transformation.