Swans bid farewell to an era with ‘Newly Sentient Being’

Some bands fade out. Swans go out in a wall of sound. On October 2, Michael Gira and co. will release ‘Newly Sentient Being’ via Young God Records — a sprawling audio and video document of the band’s final “Big Sound” performance, captured live in Berlin on November 28, 2025.

This is the closing chapter of a specific, monumental version of Swans: the lineup of Gira, Kristof Hahn, Dana Schechter, Larry Mullins, Phil Puleo, Christopher Pravdica, and Norman Westberg, who reconvened in 2010 and spent the next fifteen years building some of the most physically overwhelming live music around. ‘Newly Sentient Being’ clocks in at two and a half hours, packed with unreleased material never previously recorded, plus a DVD of the full performance directed by Marco Porsia and Peter Harton.

Gira didn’t mince words about what this era meant, or that it’s truly over:

“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.“

He’s already looking ahead too, teasing a shift toward something “more humble, and intimate” for the next phase of Swans.

Format Options

‘Newly Sentient Being’ will be available as a 4LP+DVD set with poster, a 2CD+DVD with fold-out booklet, a limited box set exclusive to the Young God Records webstore, and digitally. Pre-orders are open now.

Track list

1. The End of Forgetting
2. The Merge
3. Paradise is Mine
4. Newly Sentient Being
5. The End of Regretting