Michael Gira, here shown performing in
Kansas City, Missouri in September 2012.
Early years (1982–1985) Initial influences The earliest known lineup of Swans comprised Gira on bass guitar and vocals,
Jonathan Kane on drums, Sue Hanel on guitar, Mojo on percussion and tape loops and
Thurston Moore, Dan Braun or Jonathan Tessler on the second bass guitar. Tessler also played metal percussion and tape loops in another variation of the line-up with Gira on bass, Moore on guitar, and Kane on drums. Hanel's only recordings with the group are on the compilation
Body to Body, Job to Job, but the ambiguous personnel credits do not make it clear on which songs she performed. Kane stated that "Sue was the most fearsome guitarist we'd ever heard in New York. She was unbelievable." This lineup of the group also featured saxophonist Daniel Galli-Duani, who had previously played with Kane as the avant-garde duo Transmission. Some similarities worth noting—the music of early Swans was often based on a single
riff, played repeatedly to hypnotic effect. The whole is reminiscent of earlier
no wave bands, such as
Mars, and the work of Swans' contemporaries, like
Sonic Youth's
Confusion Is Sex and
Kill Yr Idols; but critic Ned Raggett contends that "early Swans really is like little else on the planet before or since".
Young God has been known by several names, usually by one of its two A-sides, such as "I Crawled" or, notoriously, as "Raping a Slave". Swans were, in this era, Gira on vocals,
Westberg on guitar, Harry Crosby on bass guitar and
Roli Mosimann on drums. This lent a reputation to the name Swans which was one of the contributing factors in Gira's retirement of the band in 1997. Since Swans' re-formation, Gira has made a point of maintaining the intensity of their live show, stating that it is at once "soul-uplifting and body-destroying". He has also sometimes turned off the air conditioning before Swans performed and compared the experience to a Native American
sweat lodge.
Stylistic shift (1986–1988) 1986's
Greed was not as brutal or noisy as Swans' previous releases, while still being an extremely ominous and dark record. It also saw two new and significant musicians join the group. New bassist
Algis Kizys would become a long-time, near-constant member, as would new vocalist/keyboardist Jarboe (who had joined the band a month before the release of the 1985 "
Time Is Money (Bastard)" 12-inch, on which she had been credited simply with "scream").
Greed was followed by its "twin" album,
Holy Money, the first to feature
Jarboe contributing lead vocals (on "You Need Me"). Her presence began a slow thawing in the overt brutality and energy of Swans' early work, while
Holy Money was also the first album by the group to incorporate acoustic elements: in particular, the eight-minute dirge "Another You", which starts with a
bluesy
harmonica introduction. It also marks the introduction of religious themes in Swans records with the sacrificial ode "A Hanging", complete with gospel-like backing vocals from Jarboe. (Jarboe would also sing lead on "Blackmail", a B-side from the
A Screw 12". Both tracks appeared on the original CD version of
Holy Money and the
Greed/Holy Money compilation, while a minimal version of the latter also appears on
Children of God.)
Children of God (1987) further expanded Jarboe's role, acting as a foil to Michael Gira's tales of suffering, torture and humiliation. The stories portrayed here, however, are ever the more unusual, given their juxtaposition—and admixture—with religious imagery. The intention was neither to mock nor embrace religion, but experiment with the power inherent in its messages and the hypocrisy of many of its leaders. Some songs, such as "Beautiful Child", retain the vocal style of earlier days, but many are quite tame. The almost
baroque "In My Garden", for example, added an extra dimension with piano (used before on "Fool" and "Sealed in Skin" to far grimmer effect) and
acoustic guitar. In between the two poles, there are pieces like "Sex, God, Sex" (heavy metal-like bass riffs with blues and gospel-inspired singing), "Blood and Honey" (a
murder ballad with early
post-rock tendencies) and "Blind Love" (a lengthy song, alternating between intoned vocals and violent instrumental passages). Gira considers this to be the band's major turning point, saying by 1986/7 Swans "had run its course with the physical assault of sound that they had employed previously for the most part. I wanted to move on to other things and didn't want to get stuck in some style, which in our case had the potential of becoming cartoonish if we'd continued in that direction.
Later years (1988–1997) After the
Children of God album, Gira professed himself tired with the band's fearsome reputation for noise, feeling that their audience now had expectations that he had no intention of fulfilling. He made a conscious decision to tone down the band's sound, introducing more acoustic elements and increasingly emphasizing Jarboe as a singer. The first results of this shift in direction were the two records recorded by Gira and Jarboe under the names
Skin (in Europe) and
World of Skin (in the US). The first,
Blood, Women, Roses, featured Jarboe on lead vocals, and the second,
Shame, Humility, Revenge, featured Gira on lead vocals. Both were recorded together in 1987, although
Shame, Humility, Revenge was not released until 1988. These albums are full of slow, ethereal, melancholy, dirge-like songs, sounding like stripped-down acoustic versions of the
Children of God songs. The band continued this transformation with an unexpected cover of
Joy Division's "
Love Will Tear Us Apart", which was released as a single in 1988 on Product Inc. in a confusing array of 7" and 12" inch formats. Both Gira and Jarboe sang lead vocals on different versions of the song. In later years Gira dismissed this release as a mistake, and for a long time refused to reissue his own vocal version, although Jarboe's version was re-released much sooner. However their version of the song was a hit on US college radio in 1988, which led to the group being offered a major label deal at Uni/MCA. "I'd worked so hard all my life", said Gira. "At 15, I was digging ditches in the desert, and I put myself through college painting houses. I never saw any money from any of our records. So by the time I finally got that carrot dangled in front of me, it was like, 'at last, I can make a living at what I love to do'." This single was followed by
The Burning World (1989), Swans' first and only major label album. Released on
Uni/
MCA Records, the record was produced by
Bill Laswell and expanded the acoustic palette introduced on
Greed and
Children of God. For this album, the core line-up of Michael Gira, Jarboe and Westberg was augmented by session musicians, and the distinctive heavy guitar element of their earlier work was toned down significantly in favor of
folk and
world music elements. Though Swans would later explore more acoustic music with similar moods, Gira has stated that, while he admires much of Laswell's work, his efforts with Swans were simply a mismatch. The album reportedly sold 5000 copies in the UK, one of the lowest numbers in the history of MCA Records, and was soon deleted from MCA's catalogue. After dissolving Swans, Gira formed
Angels of Light, continued his work with Young God Records and Jarboe continued her solo work.
Reformation and "big sound" era (2010–2025) in May 2011. From left to right: Thor Harris, Christoph Hahn, Phil Puleo (behind drum set), Gira, Chris Pravdica and Norman Westberg. In January 2010, Swans' re-formation was heralded with a new song posted on the Young God Records' MySpace, and officially confirmed by a post on the Young God Records
Facebook and
MySpace accounts. Gira decided to bring back Swans during an Angels of Light show five years prior. In the middle of performing the song
The Provider onstage utilizing "large chords that were very sustained and swaying, in this sort of slave-ship rhythm", he felt "a nascent urge right then to re-form or reinvigorate Swans because I remembered how elevating and intense that experience was". To help raise money for the upcoming new Swans album, Gira released a new solo album,
I Am Not Insane, via his Young God Records website.
LAS Magazine posted an article entitled "Kickstart My Art" on alternative financing in "a cash-strapped music industry, unable to rely on record label financing, [that] is positioning its own quid pro quo: fan dollars to fund projects in exchange for exclusive material and a sense of involvement" that cites Swans selling out of the 1,000 signed and numbered copies of
I Am Not Insane as an example of reverse financing where proceeds from one project are rolled over to finance the next. 2012 Swans then went on a series of U.S. and European tour dates, and headlined the
Supersonic Festival in Birmingham, England in October 2010. The first post-reformation Swans album,
My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky, was released on September 23, 2010, and the band simultaneously embarked on an eighteen-month world tour. Initially released as a limited handmade edition of 1000 copies,
We Rose... was re-released in May 2012 as a deluxe
digipak. On July 15, 2013, Gira announced a new, handmade live album in the vein of
I Am Not Insane and
We Rose..., titled
Not Here / Not Now. The album was announced for sale on October 14, with the proceeds helping to fund the recording of the new Swans studio album with
John Congleton, announced in 2014 as
To Be Kind. In 2014 the band announced that it signed with
Mute Records for the world outside North America and that the band would be touring. That same year, in November, the band curated a three-day program at
Le Guess Who? in Utrecht, The Netherlands, including
Wire,
Silver Apples,
Ben Frost,
Prurient and Words to the Blind, a project by
Savages together with Japanese band
Bo Ningen. In 2014 both
The Seer and
To Be Kind were ranked on
Pitchforks "Top 100 Albums of the Decade So Far 2010–2014".
The Seer was ranked 17, and
To Be Kind was ranked 85. The band announced on July 22, 2015, that they would be recording their fourteenth studio album in September 2015, following a fundraiser album entitled
The Gate, as with the three previous post-reunion studio albums. On April 5, 2016, the band announced
The Glowing Man and shared a two-minute excerpt of the twenty-nine minute title track. The album was released on June 17, 2016, on
Young God Records and
Mute Records, and is the final Swans album released under a mostly homogeneous lineup, although Gira continues to record Swans music with "a revolving cast" of musicians, as of 2019. This final incarnation of the band announced for immediate release a live album,
Deliquescence, on May 17. The album, limited to 3,000 CD-only copies, contains three tracks that have previously only been played live. Following a nearly year-long break from Swans, Gira announced a brief tour of new Swans material playing along the West Coast of the United States, which started in September 2018 accompanied by longtime Swans guitarist Norman Westberg with recording of a new album commencing in Berlin in February 2019. The fifteenth Swans album was preceded (and financed) by another fundraiser album of demos,
What Is This?, released in March 2019. Updates between June and August 2019 confirmed that the upcoming album was fully recorded, mixed and mastered. On September 5, the album was revealed to be called
Leaving Meaning, and a single from the album titled "It's Coming It's Real" was released. The album itself was released on October 25. It features guitarist Christoph Hahn, percussionist
Larry Mullins and bassist Yoyo Röhm as main contributors. In 2019, a documentary about the band, called
Where Does a Body End?, was also released by Italian-American director Marco Porsia. In March 2021, Gira announced a new Swans album with an Instagram post of a tracklist. On January 6, 2022, Michael Gira announced on his Instagram that a new fundraiser album was available via Young God Records, called
Is There Really a Mind?. The fundraiser album sold out in just nine days. Young God Records said Swans would begin recording in April 2022. On March 22, 2023, the album was revealed to be titled
The Beggar, and a single from the album titled "Paradise Is Mine" was released.
The Beggar was released on June 23, 2023. In July 2024, Gira announced a live album
Live Rope, recorded at performances in 2023 and 2024, and intended to fund the creation of another Swans album. On November 15, 2024, Gira announced on Instagram that the album would be titled
Birthing, to be mixed in Berlin that month and released in 2025, and described it as "the final "big sound" Swans album: Going forward (after the release of
Birthing and its subsequent tours), things will be simpler and more intimate for Swans. When that time comes, I look forward to discovering a fresh path towards a new sonic terrain in which to dwell. "I Am a Tower", the first single from
Birthing, was released on February 25, 2025. The album was also given a release date of May 30, 2025. ==Musical style and legacy==