Swans (band)
Swans are an American experimental rock band formed in 1981 by singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Michael Gira. One of the few acts to emerge from the New York City–based no wave scene and stay intact into the next decade, Swans have become recognized for an ever-changing sound, exploring genres such as noise rock, post-punk, industrial and post-rock. Initially, their music was known for its sonic brutality and misanthropic lyrics. Following the addition of singer, songwriter and keyboardist Jarboe in 1986, Swans began to incorporate melody and intricacy into their music. Jarboe remained the band's only constant member with Gira and semi-constant guitarist Norman Westberg until their dissolution in 1997.
In 2010, Gira re-formed the band without Jarboe, establishing a stable lineup of musicians which toured worldwide and released several albums to critical acclaim. This iteration of the group performed its last shows in November 2017, ending the tour in support of its then most recent album The Glowing Man. Since 2019, Gira has been touring and recording with Swans as "a revolving cast of contributors". The band's latest album, Birthing, was released on May 30, 2025. Since 1990, all Swans records have been released through Gira's own label, Young God Records.
History
Early years (1982–1985)
Initial influences
The earliest known lineup of Swans comprised Gira on bass guitar and vocals, Jonathan Kane on drums, Sue Hanel on guitar, Mojo on percussion and tape loops and Thurston Moore, Dan Braun or Jonathan Tessler on the second bass guitar. Tessler also played metal percussion and tape loops in another variation of the line-up with Gira on bass, Moore on guitar, and Kane on drums. Hanel's only recordings with the group are on the compilation Body to Body, Job to Job, but the ambiguous personnel credits do not make it clear on which songs she performed. Kane stated that "Sue was the most fearsome guitarist we'd ever heard in New York. She was unbelievable."Hanel did not stay long in the group, and by the time of their recording debut she had been replaced by Bob Pezzola. This lineup of the group also featured saxophonist Daniel Galli-Duani, who had previously played with Kane as the avant-garde duo Transmission. The debut EP, Swans, released on Labor, is markedly different from anything they would do later. However, the minimal chord structures owe more to blues, while the jazz instrumentation and awkward time signatures are evidence of Swans' roots in the no wave scene of the late 1970s, which had more or less collapsed by the release of 1984's Cop.
Early style
Kane compares Swans to blues icon Chester Burnett, a.k.a. Howlin' Wolf. Some similarities worth noting—the music of early Swans was often based on a single riff, played repeatedly to hypnotic effect. Some of Burnett's songs—especially the songs penned by Burnett himself—have a similar structure and quality. Their early music was typified by slow and grinding guitar noise, and pounding drums, punctuated by Gira's morbid and violent lyrics, usually barked or shouted. Critics have described Swans' early recordings as "aggressive beyond words".Their first full-length release, Filth, featured driving, choppy rhythms and abrasive drums. The whole is reminiscent of earlier no wave bands, such as Mars, and the work of Swans' contemporaries, like Sonic Youth's Confusion Is Sex and Kill Yr Idols; but critic Ned Raggett contends that "early Swans really is like little else on the planet before or since". Filth was the first album to feature guitarist Norman Westberg, who would play a vital role in much of Swans' music and would feature on every subsequent studio album apart from Love of Life.
Cop and the originally untitled Young God EP were both released in 1984 and re-released together on CD in 1992. Young God has been known by several names, usually by one of its two A-sides, such as "I Crawled" or, notoriously, as "Raping a Slave". This release is often confused with their self-titled debut. The music continues in the same vein as Filth, and is again vaguely reminiscent of heavy metal music played in extreme slow motion. Swans were, in this era, Gira on vocals, Westberg on guitar, Harry Crosby on bass guitar and Roli Mosimann on drums. Gira's vocals had changed slightly, becoming slowly more melodic, although the snarl still remained. Some of the songs on the EP, particularly "Young God" and "I Crawled", have an actual vocal melody, if rudimentary, hinting at the sounds of future releases.
Godflesh frontman Justin Broadrick shared this impression of the group:
Live shows
One of the trademarks of Swans' early period was playing at painfully loud volumes during concerts, sometimes leading to police stopping shows. Gira was also notably confrontational with the audience, such as stepping on people's fingers resting on the stage, pulling people's hair and, notably, physically assaulting anyone caught in the crowd headbanging, something Gira detested. This lent a reputation to the name Swans which was one of the contributing factors in Gira's retirement of the band in 1997.Since Swans' re-formation, Gira has made a point of maintaining the intensity of their live show, stating that it is at once "soul-uplifting and body-destroying". He has also sometimes turned off the air conditioning before Swans performed and compared the experience to a Native American sweat lodge.
Stylistic shift (1986–1988)
1986's Greed was not as brutal or noisy as Swans' previous releases, while still being an extremely ominous and dark record. It also saw two new and significant musicians join the group. New bassist Algis Kizys would become a long-time, near-constant member, as would new vocalist/keyboardist Jarboe.Greed was followed by its "twin" album, Holy Money, the first to feature Jarboe contributing lead vocals. Her presence began a slow thawing in the overt brutality and energy of Swans' early work, while Holy Money was also the first album by the group to incorporate acoustic elements: in particular, the eight-minute dirge "Another You", which starts with a bluesy harmonica introduction. It also marks the introduction of religious themes in Swans records with the sacrificial ode "A Hanging", complete with gospel-like backing vocals from Jarboe.
Children of God further expanded Jarboe's role, acting as a foil to Michael Gira's tales of suffering, torture and humiliation. The stories portrayed here, however, are ever the more unusual, given their juxtaposition—and admixture—with religious imagery. The intention was neither to mock nor embrace religion, but experiment with the power inherent in its messages and the hypocrisy of many of its leaders.
Some songs, such as "Beautiful Child", retain the vocal style of earlier days, but many are quite tame. The almost baroque "In My Garden", for example, added an extra dimension with piano and acoustic guitar. In between the two poles, there are pieces like "Sex, God, Sex", "Blood and Honey" and "Blind Love". Gira considers this to be the band's major turning point, saying by 1986/7 Swans "had run its course with the physical assault of sound that they had employed previously for the most part. I wanted to move on to other things and didn't want to get stuck in some style, which in our case had the potential of becoming cartoonish if we'd continued in that direction.
Later years (1988–1997)
After the Children of God album, Gira professed himself tired with the band's fearsome reputation for noise, feeling that their audience now had expectations that he had no intention of fulfilling. He made a conscious decision to tone down the band's sound, introducing more acoustic elements and increasingly emphasizing Jarboe as a singer. The first results of this shift in direction were the two records recorded by Gira and Jarboe under the names Skin and World of Skin. The first, Blood, Women, Roses, featured Jarboe on lead vocals, and the second, Shame, Humility, Revenge, featured Gira on lead vocals. Both were recorded together in 1987, although Shame, Humility, Revenge was not released until 1988. These albums are full of slow, ethereal, melancholy, dirge-like songs, sounding like stripped-down acoustic versions of the Children of God songs.The band continued this transformation with an unexpected cover of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart", which was released as a single in 1988 on Product Inc. in a confusing array of 7" and 12" inch formats. Both Gira and Jarboe sang lead vocals on different versions of the song. In later years Gira dismissed this release as a mistake, and for a long time refused to reissue his own vocal version, although Jarboe's version was re-released much sooner. However their version of the song was a hit on US college radio in 1988, which led to the group being offered a major label deal at Uni/MCA. "I'd worked so hard all my life", said Gira. "At 15, I was digging ditches in the desert, and I put myself through college painting houses. I never saw any money from any of our records. So by the time I finally got that carrot dangled in front of me, it was like, 'at last, I can make a living at what I love to do.'"
This single was followed by The Burning World, Swans' first and only major label album. Released on Uni/MCA Records, the record was produced by Bill Laswell and expanded the acoustic palette introduced on Greed and Children of God. For this album, the core line-up of Michael Gira, Jarboe and Westberg was augmented by session musicians, and the distinctive heavy guitar element of their earlier work was toned down significantly in favor of folk and world music elements. Though Swans would later explore more acoustic music with similar moods, Gira has stated that, while he admires much of Laswell's work, his efforts with Swans were simply a mismatch. The album reportedly sold 5000 copies in the UK, one of the lowest numbers in the history of MCA Records, and was soon deleted from MCA's catalogue.
The Burning World was the first Swans album to feature more conventional pop melodies. Gira's lyrics still favored themes of depression, death, greed and despair, but were actually sung, rather than the chanting or shouting typical of earlier material. They even covered Steve Winwood's popular Blind Faith hit "Can't Find My Way Home", one of two singles from the LP.
In 1990, Gira and Jarboe released the third and final World of Skin album, Ten Songs for Another World. It was less successful than the previous two Skin albums.
Gira's disillusionment with their Uni/MCA exploits led to White Light from the Mouth of Infinity, a successful blending of earlier hard rock and later pop styles. Produced by Gira, the album blended acoustic rock, blues and hypnotic guitar noise successfully, resulting in an album more complex than anything they had released in the past. This album was followed by Love of Life, the EP single Love of Life/Amnesia, taking the group even farther into experimentation, and then The Great Annihilator, considered to be one of the band's most accessible releases, possibly through being their most straightforward. The songwriting style and musical approach, however, would take a more unusual turn the following year.