The band’s 2010-2025 configuration performed its last show in Berlin on November 28, 2025

Swans have announced Newly Sentient Being, a document of the group’s last performance under what the band calls the “Big Sound” configuration, played in Berlin on 28 November 2025. The release is set for 2 October 2026 through Mute / Young God Records, arriving as a 4-vinyl and DVD set with an included poster, a double CD and DVD edition with a fold-out booklet, and a digital version.

Title: Newly Sentient Being
Artist: Swans
Release Date: 2026-10-02
Genres: Avant-garde, No Wave, Noise Rock, Post-rock
Label: Mute Records, Young God Records
Description: Swans release Newly Sentient Being, their final Big Sound concert, out October 2, 2026 via Mute / Young God Records.

The recording runs two and a half hours and includes material that has not been recorded before. A DVD of the concert, directed by Marco Porsia and Peter Harton, is included in both physical editions. The performance closes a phase of the band that ran from 2010 to 2025, involving Michael Gira, Kristof Hahn, Dana Schechter, Larry Mullins, Phil Puleo, Christopher Pravdica and Norman Westberg.

In a statement accompanying the announcement, Gira describes reconvening Swans in 2010 after having disbanded the group years earlier “out of frustration, disappointment and exhaustion.” He characterizes the subsequent period as one in which the music, at its highest points, took on a life independent of the musicians playing it, calling it “a raging, sentient autonomous beast that played us.” He states that this phase is now finished and that Swans will move toward what he terms a “more humble, and intimate musical palette.”

Michael Gira (read our interview with Michael Gira) founded Swans in New York City in 1982, during the city’s no wave period. Early releases, including Filth and Cop, were built on high-volume, abrasive sound and confrontational lyrics. The band’s sound shifted repeatedly over the following years: toward mechanized rhythm on the Greed period, into the combined atmospheric and martial passages of the double album Children of God (1987), and toward acoustic arrangements on The Burning World (1989). After the band relocated to Atlanta, it produced the more melodic White Light from the Mouth of Infinity (1991) and Love of Life (1993), followed by the sharper The Great Annihilator (1994). Soundtracks For The Blind (1996), a release of more than two hours, drew together these approaches and closed out Swans’ first 15-year run; Gira disbanded the group afterward.

Over the following 13 years, Gira recorded and toured under the name Angels of Light, and ran his label Young God Records, on which he released work by artists including Devendra Banhart and Akron/Family.

Swans resumed activity in 2010 with the studio album My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky. The Seer (2012), a triple album, reached Billboard’s Top 200 following extensive touring. To Be Kind debuted at 36 on the Billboard Top 200 Sales Chart and 5 on the Independent Sales Chart; the tour that followed included sold-out two-night engagements in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Paris, along with single shows in London, Berlin and Rome, and an album stream premiered by NPR. The Glowing Man (2017) was the final studio album by that lineup. Leaving Meaning (2019) and The Beggar (2023) were made with a rotating group of collaborators. Birthing (2025), the band’s seventeenth studio album, was announced as the final “Big Sound” recording.

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