Birthing marks the end of an era, the last time Swans will go this big, and what a way to bow out. In a career stretching over 40 years, this band has redefined what experimental rock can do, and Birthing feels like the final, enormous exhale.

This is a full stop at the end of a monumental chapter. Since the band’s rebirth in 2010, albums like The Seer, To Be Kind and The Glowing Man have pushed the limit of sonic intensity, and Birthing is the final refinement of that arc, giving you what they’ve been honing all this time without distractions or interludes, just seven huge pieces, each reaching for something massive. The opening of The Healers evokes a hint of Wish You Were Here-era Floyd in the slow lift-off, whilst the end of I Am A Tower clearly echoes Bowie’s Heroes, and it feels like these chords are just where one naturally ends up when reaching for something so beautiful and vast.

There’s not really a story here. There are lots of words about birth, death, blood, mothers, fathers, and God, but the point isn’t what Michael Gira is saying, but how the words feel when delivered like an incantation. The phrases themselves are the meaning. “I am a tower” is a colossal, monolithic statement, and when the music underneath it is booming and surging like a tidal wave, it lands with brilliant weight. Gira is selecting words for how they sound and what they conjure in the gut rather than what they might mean in a strict sense.

Swans are about the raw psychological impact of sound, with every chord, noise, and lyric built to test how deeply music can shake us. Whether it can unnerve us and inspire awe, terrifying us without ever offering a clear narrative. It’s not about what Gira is trying to say, but about what it does to your body when you hear it. Across its seven sprawling tracks, Birthing moves through extraordinary emotional terrain, opening in brooding, smothering darkness, but on the title track everything opens up, and the music feels like sunrise. Even though this has been framed as Swans’ final swan song in their current, colossal incarnation, the title Birthing suggests newness, and this is the sound of music being born, even at the end of a decades-long arc. Maybe that contradiction is the point, as Swans continue to traffic in paradox: beauty through brutality, and clarity through noise.

Scattered across the record are a baby cooing, a dog barking, a child professing love for its mother, but these aren’t narrative devices or symbols to be decoded. Rather they’re stimuli, the baby coo unexpectedly soothing, the dog bark genuinely jarring, and The Merge beginning with the tender voice of a child before crashing into one of the nastiest electronic ruptures of all time. Like every other part of Birthing, these samples are part of a larger experiment: which sounds disarm, which terrify, which console, and which annihilate.

This is emotional experimentation at the most primal level, which is what Swans have always sought to do. Across their four-decade career, Michael Gira and his collaborators have returned again and again to the question: what can sound do to us? Birthing is punishing, beautiful, and the absolute opposite of radio-friendly guitar music.