‘Newly Sentient Being’ Review: SWANS’ “Big Sound” incarnation reaches its ultimate apotheosis on epic live album.
SWANS’ new live album, Newly Sentient Being (Oct. 2, Young God Records), is the monumental final document of the band’s “Big Sound” era, capturing a group at the apotheosis of 15 years of extreme sonic expressionism, where beauty and brutality, transcendence and debasement have maintained an uneasy alliance.
With only five songs stretched across more than two and a half hours, Newly Sentient Being is hardly a casual listen, but that is to be expected for a band as uncompromising as SWANS. It is a demanding but deeply rewarding immersion into the world Michael Gira and his collaborators have spent the last decade and a half constructing. Recorded November 28, 2025, at Berlin’s Festsaal Kreuzberg, it feels like the closing chapter to one of the most affecting musical journeys of recent memory.
Since Gira resurrected SWANS in 2010, the band has produced an extraordinary sequence of albums and performances that have, remarkably, come to rival and in some respects eclipse the group’s already legendary earlier work. That is a remarkable statement considering the singular ferocity of Swans’ original output. Yet the “Big Sound” era developed its own language: colossal repetition, glacial builds, orchestral volume and hypnotic rhythms, in which songs ceased to behave like conventional compositions and became environments to inhabit.
Newly Sentient Being is the final and most definitive document of that approach.
Three of the five pieces are new compositions, while “The Merge” and “Paradise Is Mine” originated on 2025’s Birthing and 2023’s The Beggar, respectively. As is SWANS’ modus operandi, these live renditions are not simply recreations of their studio counterparts. They mutate considerably, becoming longer, stranger and more volatile. The songs are less performed than subjected to the particular alchemy of the stage, where Gira’s band has rearranged the song’s innards while keeping the exoskeleton intact.
“The End of Forgetting” opens the album with a disorienting synthesizer introduction and a throbbing, heartbeat-like bass pulse. There is an almost dreamy atmosphere initially, conjuring strange wintry images as glacial lap steel gradually draws the listener into a trance. At around the 16-minute mark, however, the serenity begins to rot. Gira starts wailing as though speaking in tongues while ragged guitar distortion creeps into the mix and the drums become increasingly martial.
By the 18-minute mark, the tension erupts into a violent orgasm of clattering percussion and screaming sonics, at one point resembling the sustained shriek of a dental drill. The assault continues for several minutes before suddenly collapsing back into something more serene, though Gira’s bleating vocals prevent the calm from ever becoming entirely comforting. The song drifts into something resembling a sea shanty before dissolving into waves of volume swells and a seasick shoegaze dirge. It gradually builds again, only to finally disappear into a hush.
If “The End of Forgetting” establishes the album’s aquatic and elemental character, “The Merge” throws the listener directly into the undertow.
Beginning with a sinister bassline, clattering drums and a frenzied guitar riff that sounds like a bee buzzing angrily before delivering its inevitable sting, the song is an exercise in sustained distress. Another guitar seems to approximate the outcry that follows the sting. It is a patience tester, certainly, but that patience is precisely the point. Swans have always understood that anticipation can be as powerful as release, and the music reaches such urgent, escalating waves of angst that you can practically feel your blood pressure rising simply by listening.
After more than 13 minutes, the initial intensity finally subsides, giving way to a comparatively jazzy groove beneath Gira’s intimidating delivery. “BLACK WATER!” he bellows as scything guitars cut through the proceedings like razor blades before the entire performance erupts into a full-blown noise-rock seizure.
Then, almost perversely, it evaporates into a queasy sideways melody as Gira sings of a broken body being tied into a knot, thrown into water and drowned, continuing the aquatic lyrical imagery that permeates the album.
That theme isn’t incidental. Water, drowning, birth, death and transformation recur throughout the album, creating the sensation that the listener is being pulled to enormous subterranean depths. There is rarely solid ground.
“Paradise Is Mine,” is comparatively brief at under 15 minutes. It begins with strange, almost nonsensical vocalizations before slowly building an atmosphere of terror. The performance is transfixing and knowing this is effectively the final live rendition of the song adds another layer of finality to the proceedings.
Then comes the album’s centerpiece and longest track. “Newly Sentient Being”, clocking in at almost an hour, is one of the most labyrinthine and harrowing compositions the band has ever performed.
Beginning with dulcimer, the song slowly develops into a swirling whirlpool of sound. The instrumentation creates an oceanic soundscape that seems to approximate a growing tidal wave, with ghostly choral voices hovering somewhere above the storm.
Around the midpoint, a relatively conventional, at least by SWANS standards, guitar riff and drum pattern emerges. It is lurching and sinister, but its comparatively recognizable structure only makes the surrounding chaos feel more unstable. The tension never relents. Instead, the song coils and uncoils like a snake enveloping its prey, gradually increasing in tempo and intensity until it resembles a frenzied occult ritual approaching its sacrificial stage.
A manic drum solo provides the violent climax before the music finally begins to ebb, evaporating into an aural vapor trail.
The final track, “The End of Regretting,” provides something resembling tranquility, although SWANS’ definition of tranquility remains considerably more ominous and fragile than most bands. Whispered vocals gradually become tauter as sounds resembling scurrying spider legs emerge from the mix. Near the end, a guitar lumbers into the picture like a chainsaw while another unidentified sound, one of many exotic instrumental textures scattered throughout the record, buzzes like an unrepentant mosquito. An Ennio Morricone-esque burst of harmonica eventually signals the song’s (and album’s) seismic conclusion.
Gira’s goal for this incarnation was not simply to perform, but to allow the band (and the listener) to lose themselves inside the music, to inhabit its heady atmosphere, allowing volume, repetition, physical endurance and collective improvisational force to create something larger than the sum of its parts. And that intent is delivered tenfold on this release.
There have been plenty of great live SWANS records, but Newly Sentient Being ranks alongside the band’s most essential. It captures the final performance of a particular group of musicians who spent 15 years developing one of the most overwhelming live experiences in contemporary music. Norman Westberg, Dana Schechter, Phil Puleo, Larry Mullins, Kristof Hahn, Christopher Pravdica and Gira himself didn’t simply provide accompaniment to these songs. They constructed the enormous musical organism Gira envisioned.
The four-vinyl set, accompanied by a DVD of the Berlin performance, gives this final concert the physical scale it deserves, and encapsulates what made this era so extraordinary.
Gira has said that there is nowhere else to take this particular incarnation of the group, and that the next phase will employ a “decidedly more humble and intimate musical palette.” The mind reels at the possibilities inherent in SWANS’ switching gears, but whatever that future brings, Newly Sentient Being stands as the ultimate monument to what came before.
