Even then, in his proverbial nascence, there was something different about Gira’s vision. Bands like Mars, Theoretical Girls, and Sonic Youth were pushing guitar noise to its very brink, seeing what morphologies could be recovered from the process of wreckage. It sounded scrappy, and boundless and raw, but Gira was already shaping monsters. Early Swans material was built out of clanging industrial noise that sounded like dying machines. It was loud and lonely and appalling, and moved relentlessly forward. They were one of the only bands from the no wave scene to survive in their purest form, and as Sonic Youth ascended to the mainstream and beyond, Gira seemingly burrowed Swans deeper and deeper underground, building an insular world for the ever-changing collective to work towards their pursuit of obliteration. Even as their music grew softer and more patient, it remained a halting, misanthropic presence. Then, in 1996, after touring their critically-acclaimed drone and audio collage-inspired Soundtracks for the Blind, Gira disbanded Swans. 

In the ensuing years, Gira turned his attention to Angels of Light, a folk project that abandoned the harsh noise of Swans in favour of countrified, hyper-melodic arrangements. It also allowed him to devote himself to his primary instrument and one that he still uses to craft songs, the acoustic guitar. The story goes that at one of his shows, Gira had a sudden realization that the immense emotion that the music he was writing carried urgently needed a similarly immense sound to become true. And so, in 2010, just as unceremoniously as he had ended them, Gira brought Swans back to life.

“I was happy to do Angels of Light, but it didn’t do much in terms of reaching people,” he says, explaining that the resurrected Swans, if nothing else, was a way to connect his music to listeners on a more visceral level.

Again, this newfound work was different. Gira was no longer warping from the outside in. The reawakened Swans were now building enormous outward spires of sound, shaping colossal albums that sounded as imposingly finite as they were irresolute. It was still misanthropic and appalling in its own way, but Gira was grasping for something larger, more transcendent. Big open chords and gospelled progressions were finding their way into his droning, heavy arrangements. By then, the collective, still endlessly morphing, was a critical darling, which allowed Gira to take his new vision across the world and back. 

All of this leads us to Birthing, the returned Swans’ seventh LP, and according to Gira, the last monolith he will build.