Swans announce ‘Newly Sentient Being’, final Big Sound live album
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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.
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 here.
1. "The End of Forgetting" 39:08
2. "The Merge" 38:55
3. "Paradise Is Mine" 13:59
4. "Newly Sentient Being" 53:24
5. "The End of Regretting" 14:58
“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. 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.
