Leaving Meaning begins with “Hums,” two minutes of voices suspended in air, as though Swans has returned without yet deciding which body it will inhabit. That uncertainty is the album’s central fact. After ending the fixed 2010–2017 lineup that made The Seer, To Be Kind and The Glowing Man, Michael Gira rebuilt Swans as a revolving assembly chosen song by song. The result is neither a retreat from those records nor another attempt to outgrow them through greater volume. It is a change in architecture. Instead of one band repeatedly transforming its own accumulated force, thirty-two musicians enter and leave according to the atmosphere each composition requires.
“Annaline” makes the new openness immediately audible. Acoustic guitar, soft percussion and layered voices create something close to a hymn, but Gira’s singing prevents comfort from becoming secure. His voice carries gratitude and apprehension simultaneously, as if beauty itself might disappear when named too directly. The song demonstrates that Swans does not require physical punishment to feel severe. A quiet arrangement can become enormous when every sound appears to be holding back an unknowable consequence.
“The Hanging Man” restores the body through an obsessive bass figure, drums and repeated vocal commands. The title invokes suspension, execution and the inverted figure of the tarot card, but the music refuses a single symbolic solution. Rhythm becomes a mechanism that keeps turning while Gira’s voice pushes against it. This is the older Swans principle of repetition as ordeal, rebuilt with more air between the parts. The pressure comes not from a solid wall but from hearing separate forces lock together until escape seems structurally impossible.
“Amnesia” returns to a song first released during Swans’ early-1990s period, but the new version is not nostalgic self-covering. Anna and Maria von Hausswolff’s voices gather around Gira, while Phil Puleo’s hammered dulcimer and the expanded arrangement move the song from private accusation toward ritual remembrance. Amnesia is not simple forgetting here. It is the active rearrangement of the past, the way an old statement changes because the person repeating it is no longer the person who first spoke it.
The title track belongs to The Necks, whose piano, bass and drums build one of their characteristic slowly evolving environments beneath Gira’s minimal direction. “Leaving Meaning” does not abandon meaning in favor of emptiness. It suggests leaving behind the demand that meaning become fixed. Tony Buck, Lloyd Swanton and Chris Abrahams create a musical surface whose relationships keep changing depending upon where attention settles. Gira’s words enter like objects placed within a current, temporarily visible before the improvisation alters their apparent weight.
“Sunfucker” is the album’s great violent contradiction. Its title is deliberately crude, while the music reaches toward devotion through an enormous cyclical rise. Anna and Maria von Hausswolff’s voices intensify the ritual atmosphere, and the repeated phrase becomes accusation, prayer and ecstatic self-erasure in turn. Swans has always understood that sacred and obscene language are neighboring tools, both capable of breaking ordinary speech. The track does not resolve that opposition. It keeps turning until disgust and worship begin using the same breath.
“Cathedrals of Heaven” follows with a slower procession. Percussion, lap steel and choral voices construct a building without walls, one made from recurrence and resonance rather than stone. Gira’s cathedral is not a safe religious institution. It is an imagined scale against which the individual briefly recognizes how small and strange consciousness is. The piece contains grandeur, but its grandeur never becomes decorative. Every beautiful layer carries the possibility of disappearance.
Baby Dee sings “The Nub,” which Gira wrote specifically for her after imagining her floating through the universe in diapers and drinking milk from the stars. The premise sounds ridiculous, yet the performance becomes one of the record’s most moving departures. The Necks again provide the foundation, allowing Dee’s voice to inhabit a cosmic nursery somewhere between cabaret, lullaby and metaphysical comedy. Her presence proves the value of Gira’s revolving-cast method: the song could not have reached this peculiar emotional territory through his voice alone.
“It’s Coming It’s Real” is the album’s most direct prophecy. Acoustic strumming, swelling choir and measured percussion create the sensation of an approaching event whose nature remains unnamed. Anna and Maria von Hausswolff turn the refrain into a public warning heard from a great distance. What is coming might be death, revelation, ecological consequence, political collapse or simply the next moment. The song’s power comes from refusing to choose. Anticipation becomes the actual subject.
The remaining pieces prevent the album from closing around one interpretation. “Some New Things,” included on CD and digital editions but omitted from the vinyl sequence, moves with a harsher electronic pulse. “What Is This?” asks its childlike question over an arrangement that makes wonder and terror nearly indistinguishable. “My Phantom Limb” closes through fractured voices and unstable repetition, treating identity as something felt after part of it has already vanished. The album ends not with a declaration but with the body attempting to understand its own absence.
The recording process was geographically scattered, with principal sessions in Berlin and additional work in Reykjavik, Brooklyn and Albuquerque. That dispersed construction suits an album made from different eras of Gira’s musical life. Kristof Hahn, Larry Mullins and Yoyo Röhm form its principal working core; former Swans members return; Ben Frost contributes guitar and electronics; A Hawk and a Hacksaw add strings; Jennifer Gira and numerous singers expand the human field. Swans becomes less a band than a method for organizing encounters.
The CD and digital version lasts more than ninety minutes, includes “Some New Things,” and preserves longer mixes than the vinyl edition. This matters because Leaving Meaning depends upon duration. Its repetitions need time to stop behaving like musical devices and begin altering the room. The shorter vinyl sequence is another valid construction, but the expanded version reveals the album as a complete threshold between the monumental touring band of the previous decade and the changing ensembles that followed.
Leaving Meaning is ultimately about continuation without pretending that continuity means remaining the same. Gira ended a powerful lineup because its possibilities had been exhausted, then invited old collaborators and new voices into the vacant space. What emerged is gentler in places, but not less demanding. The album asks whether identity can survive its own reconstruction, whether memory can change without becoming false, and whether meaning remains alive only while it is being left, found and left again.
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