Swans

4LP + DVD version. Newly Sentient Being is the farewell document of the Swans that Michael Gira reconvened in 2010: the complete final concert of the band's Big Sound era, recorded at Festsaal Kreuzberg in Berlin on 28 November 2025. Over two and a half hours of music, much of it material never recorded elsewhere, played by the group that carried that sound for fifteen years.

Five long pieces, from 'The End of Forgetting' and 'The Merge' to the forty-six minutes of the title track and the closing 'The End of Regretting', move between the heavenly and the debased, the visceral and the transcendent, the music becoming what Gira calls a sentient autonomous beast that plays the band rather than the reverse. With Norman Westberg on guitar, Dana Schechter and Kristof Hahn on lap steel and loops, Christopher Pravdica on bass, Phil Puleo on drums and dulcimer and Larry Mullins on mellotron, keyboards and drums. Recorded by Hieronymus Melchers, mixed by Ingo Krauss.

Gira has announced that the next Swans will turn to a more humble and intimate palette, which makes this the closing chapter of an era and one of the band's essential live records. The set includes a DVD of the whole concert, directed by Marco Porsia and Peter Harton.

Released by Young God Records (YG69). The 4LP edition comes in a wide-spine gatefold jacket printed on chipboard, with poster, insert and the DVD; the 2CD edition in a chipboard digipack with fold-out insert and the DVD.