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American experimental rock band

Swans are an American experimental rock band formed in 1982 by singer, songwriter and multi instrumentalist Michael Gira. One of the few acts to emerge from the New York City based no wave scene and stay intact into the next decade, Swans have become recognized for an ever changing sound, exploring genres such as noise rock, post punk, industrial and post rock. Initially, their music was known for its sonic brutality and misanthropic lyrics. Following the addition of singer, songwriter and keyboardist Jarboe in 1986, Swans began to incorporate melody and intricacy into their music. Jarboe remained the band's only constant member except Gira and semi constant guitarist Norman Westberg until their dissolution in 1997. In 2010, Gira re formed the band without Jarboe, establishing a stable lineup of musicians which has toured worldwide and released four albums to critical acclaim. This iteration of the group performed its last shows in November 2017, ending the tour in support of its final album The Glowing Man. Since 2019, Gira has been touring and recording with Swans as "a revolving cast of contributors". Gira's summation of the name follows along the lines of: "Swans are majestic, beautiful looking creatures. With really ugly temperaments." Jon 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.

One of the trademarks of Swans' early period was playing at painfully loud volumes during concerts, sometimes leading to police stopping shows. Gira was also notably confrontational with the audience, such as stepping on people's fingers resting on the stage, pulling people's hair and, notably, physically assaulting anyone caught in the crowd headbanging, something Gira detested. 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.

1986's Greed saw a new addition to the group with vocalist/keyboardist Jarboe joining the band. Her initial recording with the band was on the "Time Is Money (Bastard)" 12 inch, credited simply with "scream", having joined a month earlier. Her first released tracks as lead vocalist and keyboardist for the band were on "You Need Me" on Holy Money and "Blackmail", a B side from the A Screw 12". They both appear on the original CD version of Holy Money and the Greed/Holy Money compilation, while a minimal version of the latter appears on Children of God. Her presence began a slow thawing in the overt brutality and energy of Swans' early work. Greed also marked the introduction of bassist Algis Kizys as a long time, near constant member. The album is not as brutal or noisy as their previous releases but is still an extremely ominous and dark record. This was followed by its "twin" album, Holy Money, the first to feature Jarboe on lead vocals – she had joined the band in 1985. Holy Money was also the first album by Swans 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. 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.

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 in Israel, 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. 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. 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.

Swans' music has transformed greatly over the decades, but is typically dark often focusing on themes of power, religion, sex and death, and has been most generally associated with experimental rock. According to Spin, the band demonstrates "unparalleled ability to translate the absurd violence of the human condition into music that’s as intoxicating as it is intense." Their early work, rooted in the New York City based no wave movement which was fading out by the time of their formation in 1982, is extremely aggressive, characterized by Michael Gira as "stripping down the essential elements of what we consider to be rock music". The Guardian described it as "a cacophonous rhythmic throb which drew on post punk, industrial, doom metal, NYC avant minimalism and the blues; a sound which was matched by Gira's often nihilistic, anti natalist and existential lyrical concerns delivered in a stentorian and messianic manner." It was a contribution to both industrial music and noise rock and influenced the emergence of grindcore (inspiring also the use of "grind" in musical context) and sludge metal. Later in the 1980s, Swans' music began to incorporate more melodic and intricate elements, especially since Jarboe's debut as a songwriter on 1987's Children of God. While generally maintaining much dissonance, the band's subsequent work further ventured into genres such as post punk, gothic rock, psychedelic rock and dark ambient. Swans have been cited as an influence by a variety of rock and extreme metal musicians, including members of Napalm Death, Godflesh, Melvins, Neurosis, Treponem Pal, Nirvana, Tool, My Dying Bride, Isis, Leviathan, Weakling, Khanate, Liturgy, Vision Eternel, Car Seat Headrest, Full of Hell, and Sprain.