Where to start with Swans: seventeen albums, in the order you should hear them

Start here, because both versions of the band are in the room. Recorded over six weeks at Sawmills in Cornwall and released on Caroline in October 1987, it puts Jarboe's piano and voice next to the old hammering and lets them argue. Gira's own account of the turn is blunt: by 1986 the physical assault had run its course, so he pushed the music somewhere unfamiliar. If the sequence from a hymn into a hundred-decibel dirge doesn't grab you, nothing later will.

The reunion band at its full height, cut with John Congleton at Sonic Ranch in Texas and released in May 2014. St. Vincent, Cold Specks and Little Annie turn up, and the centrepiece, 'Bring the Sun / Toussaint L'Ouverture', runs thirty-four minutes without a wasted one. It also gave Swans their first top-forty placings, No. 37 in the States and No. 38 in Britain, which after thirty years of being unlistenable on purpose is a fairly funny outcome.

Two hours and twenty minutes assembled from cassettes, rehearsal tapes and found sound going back to 1981, released on Young God in October 1996. Gira taped his father describing the loss of his sight; Jarboe used surveillance recordings her FBI-agent father had made, which caught her own childhood voice and her mother's dementia. It was meant to be the last Swans record. They toured it in 1997 and stopped for thirteen years.

Recorded in Berlin and New York and released in August 2012, this is the record that made a new generation of listeners care. The title track alone passes thirty minutes. Karen O sings 'Song for a Warrior', Jarboe returns on several pieces, and Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker of Low drift through the back half. Two hours long and it moves faster than most forty-minute albums.

The first record on Gira's own Young God label after MCA dropped the band, cut at B. Monster in New York across the winter of 1990 and released in May 1991. J.G. Thirlwell engineered part of it; Jarboe's arrangements pull the songs toward something almost gothic and almost folk. It sat out of print for years, which is the only reason it isn't discussed as often as the records around it.

May 1983, Neutral Records, cut at Vanguard in New York with two bassists and two drummers and no interest in your comfort. Riffs here are usually one note hit until it turns into a threat, with Gira shouting over the top about power and rot. Nobody cared at the time. Forty years on it's the founding document for a whole strain of heavy music that has nothing to do with metal.

The most song-shaped thing they made in the nineties: cleaner production, actual melodies, Gira and Jarboe trading lines on 'I Am the Sun'. 'Killing for Company' takes the murders of Dennis Nilsen as its subject and is far quieter than that implies. Released on Young God in January 1995 and reissued in 2017 alongside Gira's solo Drainland, which it was always meant to sit next to.

Slower than Filth, and worse for you. Recorded in New York and Zürich in 1984 for K.422, it drops the tempo, buries everything under tape loops and stays there. Ned Raggett called it possibly one of the darkest recordings ever made and he isn't overselling it. Godflesh, The Young Gods and Neurosis all took something from this; Terrorizer put it fourth on a list of the heaviest albums ever recorded.

February 1986, and the first Swans album with Jarboe on it, at that stage handling backing vocals, piano and tapes. Drum machines and a grand piano arrive alongside the anvil noise, and the band stops sounding like a single blunt instrument. AllMusic reads it as the slow turn away from pure brutality, which is right, though nobody hearing it in 1986 would have called it gentle.

Out a month after Greed and built from the same 1985 sessions at Intergalactic in New York, along with the 'A Screw' and 'Time Is Money (Bastard)' singles. Jarboe takes the first two tracks. It is the more interesting half of the pair and the more slippery one, and Maynard James Keenan has named it among the records that shaped him. Treat the two as one long album and you lose nothing.

The comeback, September 2010, the first studio record in fourteen years. Gira financed it by hand-making a thousand copies of an acoustic demo album and selling them himself, then announced the return with three words: Swans are not dead. No Jarboe this time. Devendra Banhart and Bill Rieflin guest, and the band that would go on to make The Seer is already audible in the low end.

Two hours that close the trilogy started by The Seer, released in June 2016, after which Gira dissolved the lineup that had made all three. It is the most abstract of the three and the least immediate, which is why it lands here rather than higher. Come to it once the other two have their hooks in you and the long build in the title track stops feeling like a test.

Fifty-four minutes cut at B.C. Studios in Brooklyn at the end of 1991 and released the following February. It's the only Swans album with no Norman Westberg on it anywhere, and you can hear the guitar's absence in how much room the keyboards and Jarboe's voice take. Out of print for two decades until the 2015 reissue, which is why it remains the least argued-over record of the Young God years.

October 2019, and the fixed lineup is gone. In its place: the Australian trio The Necks, Anna von Hausswolff, Ben Frost, Baby Dee and a rotating cast Gira assembles per track. The CD and the vinyl carry different mixes and different running times, ninety-three minutes against eighty-two, so the version you own genuinely changes the record. Quieter than anything since 1997 and much stranger than its reviews suggested.

Two hours on CD, released June 2023, with 'The Beggar Lover (Three)' taking up forty-four of them and left off the vinyl entirely. Much of it reads like a man taking stock of his own ending, and he does it without a shred of drama. Kristof Hahn, Dana Schechter, Christopher Pravdica and Phil Puleo hold the frame; Westberg and Ben Frost visit. This is late-period Swans that rewards patience rather than demanding endurance.

Released May 2025 and, by Gira's own account, the last record in this expansive form: what comes next will be pared right down. 115 minutes, seventeenth studio album, and the first single was a nineteen-minute piece called 'I Am a Tower', which tells you how much he cared about a radio edit. Worth hearing once you know the language, because it's an ending written by someone who knows it's an ending.

Save this one for last, and not because it's a hidden gem. Uni, a division of MCA, gave Swans a major-label deal in 1989 and Bill Laswell co-produced; the result sold around five thousand copies in Britain and the band was dropped. Gira's verdict has never softened: he abhors the record, while allowing that Laswell is a good producer they simply didn't mesh with. The cover of Blind Faith's 'Can't Find My Way Home' is lovely, and everything around it sounds like a band being talked out of itself.