Swans announce ‘Newly Sentient Being’, final Big Sound live album
Swans release “Newly Sentient Being,” recorded at their final Big Sound Berlin show, on 4-vinyl+DVD, double CD+DVD and digital, 2 October via Mute / Young God.
Swans, the New York post-industrial and experimental rock group led by Michael Gira, will release “Newly Sentient Being” on 2 October 2026 through Mute / Young God Records (North America). The record documents Swans’ final “Big Sound” performance, played in Berlin on 28 November 2025, and comes as a 4-vinyl + DVD set with poster, a double CD + DVD with fold-out booklet, and digitally.
“Newly Sentient Being” documents the closing concert of the lineup that toured as Swans from 2010 to 2025: Michael Gira, Kristof Hahn, Dana Schechter, Larry Mullins, Phil Puleo, Christopher Pravdica and Norman Westberg. The Berlin show ran over two and a half hours across just five songs, and the recordings include material never previously released. A DVD of the full performance, directed by Marco Porsia and Peter Harton, is included with the vinyl and CD editions.
The tracklist for “Newly Sentient Being” runs “The End of Forgetting,” “The Merge,” “Paradise Is Mine,” “Newly Sentient Being” and “The End of Regretting.”
Beats Per Minute reviewed the Berlin concert, writing: “What followed were over two and a half hours of music, in total just five songs with an intensity and euphoric density that eclipsed that of the previous Gira-led shows I witnessed. In emotional intensity, the concert was often closer to a tribal ritual than musical expression usually allows.”
Gira described the decision to close this era of the band in a statement:
“In 2010 I made the decision to reconvene my band, Swans, which I had, years earlier, killed out of frustration, disappointment and exhaustion. Now, I saw a light, a way forward for the music, and I decided to pursue it. […] I believe we reached some pretty tremendous highs along the way, where the music became a raging, sentient autonomous beast that played us (and the audience/listener), rather than the reverse. That was the goal all along, to lose ourselves in the swirl. […] Now this phase is finished. There’s nowhere else to take it, but we seem to have ended on a particularly high note with our final tour of this (now passing) Swans era, and I believe these current recordings convey the sensations and experience of the unique world we forged. For the next phase, I’m moving Swans into something with a decidedly more humble, and intimate musical palette, but here now I offer my praise to the righteous group of humans, the musicians that made our final foray into the sonic ether a reality: Norman Westberg, Dana Schechter, Phil Puleo, Larry Mullins, Kristof Hahn, Christopher Pravdica, and I was in there flailing somewhere too.”
Watch an excerpt from the performance below.
Swans close the 2010-2025 era with ‘Newly Sentient Being’
“Newly Sentient Being” follows Swans’ seventeenth studio album, “Birthing”, released in May 2025, and the European and UK tour the band launched that October to support it, covered by Side-Line in “Swans launch European tour”. The Berlin performance captured on “Newly Sentient Being” marked the end of that touring cycle and of the lineup formed when Gira reconvened Swans in 2010.
About Swans
Michael Gira founded Swans in New York City in 1982. The early band built a reputation for relentless, high-volume performances, abject imagery in Gira’s lyrics, and thundering vocals, documented on the albums “Filth” and “Cop.” Swans then moved into the harsh, mechanical proto-industrial rock of its Greed period, before combining haunted atmospheres and martial rhythms on the 1987 double album “Children of God.” “The Burning World,” released in 1989, brought gentler, acoustic-based material. After relocating to Atlanta, the band built dense, melody-driven sonic works on “White Light from the Mouth of Infinity” (1991) and “Love of Life” (1993), turning more dissonant and sharp-edged on “The Great Annihilator” (1994). “Soundtracks for the Blind” (1996) drew together all of these strands across more than two hours of music, closing that chapter of the band; Gira disbanded Swans after 15 years of continuous recording and touring.
For the following 13 years, Gira recorded under his own name and as Angels of Light. He reconvened Swans in 2010, beginning a second era that ran through 2025 and produced further studio albums, including “The Beggar” (2023) and “Birthing” (2025), along with international touring documented in the 2023 biopic “Where Does a Body End?”. “Newly Sentient Being” documents the final performance of that lineup and marks the end of the 2010-2025 era of the band.
Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!
Since you’re here …
… we have a small favour to ask. More people are reading Side-Line Magazine than ever but advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. Unlike many news organisations, we haven’t put up a paywall – we want to keep our journalism as open as we can - and we refuse to add annoying advertising. So you can see why we need to ask for your help.
Side-Line’s independent journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we want to push the artists we like and who are equally fighting to survive.
If everyone who reads our reporting, who likes it, helps fund it, our future would be much more secure. For as little as 5 US$, you can support Side-Line Magazine – and it only takes a minute. Thank you.
The donations are safely powered by Paypal.
