Swans announce new album ‘Birthing’ with sprawling 19-minute single ‘I Am A Tower’

nme.com:

Swans have announced their 17th studio album ‘Birthing’ – you can listen to new single ‘I Am A Tower’ below.The New York City experimental rock band are due to release the follow-up to 2023’s ‘The Beggar’ on May 30 via Mute/Young God.

You can pre-order/pre-save it here.In a statement, frontman Michael Gira shared some details about how the forthcoming LP came to be, and told fans that the project would mark the end of Swans’ current incarnation.“The material contained in this album was largely developed over the course of a yearlong Swans tour, during 2023-2024 (‘The Healers’, ‘I Am a Tower’, ‘Birthing’, ‘Guardian Spirit’, ‘Rope’, and ‘Away’), then recorded and further orchestrated and rearranged in the studio,” he explained. “Two pieces were created and performed in the studio (‘Red Yellow’, ‘The Merge’).“In all cases the material began with me sitting in my office with an acoustic guitar, singing and dreaming about what would become of these skeletal songs.”Gira went on to say that he was “blessed to have such a stellar group of musicians to work with live, and through improvisation, endless revisions and an intensity of focus in performance (not to mention endurance), over the course of time the music morphed into what you generally hear on this collection”.He continued: “This album, coupled with the recent live release, ‘Live Rope’, constitutes my final foray (as producer/impresario) into the all-consuming sound worlds that have been my obsession for years.“We’ll do a final tour in this mode towards the end of 2025, then that’s it.