- Since reforming his pioneering no-wave outfit Swans in 2010, Michael Gira has led the band through punishing, grandiose statements of darkness. From 2012’s The Seer onwards, Swans have created long, intense psychic assaults which combine art rock, drone and noise in order to not just look into the void, but jump straight in. Even for this non-squeamish listener, 2014’s To Be Kind was several tortured howls too far, so there was an understandable element of trepidation as I pressed play on the group’s latest two-hour maelstrom The Glowing Man.

It seems this new work is a song-cycle of sorts, full of darkness and dread culminating in the hypnotic folk-rock of album finale Finally, Peace. The songs sound like incantations, full of ominous choirs and chant-like vocals, as if the very void so beloved of existentialists and nihilists the world over is in itself some kind of spiritual aspiration.

The music itself is as dense and layered as ever, with Floydian pools of atmosphere in opening mantra Cloud Of Forgetting, jet-black psychedelia in the eye-wateringly long Cloud Of Unknowing and a keyboard phrase that sounds uncannily like a tip of the hat to German experimentalists Harmonia in The World Looks Red/The World Looks Black.

That aforementioned use of twenty-plus minute track lengths allows songs to uncoil slowly, bursting into cathartic releases of noisy one-chord blasts that genuinely rock. For evidence of this, see the twenty-one minute Frankie M and the sonic rollercoaster of the title track, that won’t give you much change out of half an hour.

The more concise moments are just as potent, including the gnarled gothic waltz of People Like Us and the surrealistic ballad When Will I Return?, given haunting power through the lead vocals of Gira’s wife Jennifer.

While this is a long, challenging and exhausting musical journey, The Glowing Man is arguably Swans’ most approachable entry out of their three most recent records. As dark and forbidding as it is, it’s also visceral and exciting. The band is shaking something troubling out of their system, and as a result the listener kind of does too. Between this and the melodic or tranquil portions of light that occasionally peak through, this is a strangely uplifting record.

Sure, if you played it at brutal volume, the neighbours might call the police and maybe an exorcist, but for those partial to Swans’ bone-rattling attack or anyone with a stomach for dark, expansive music, this might be one of the most exciting rock & roll records of the year.

- Matt Thrower.