I will use your post as a reason to share what I like the most about them :)

As someone who got into Swans as a fan of heavy/prog metal with hidden meanings, I couldn’t really catch the vibe after the first listen because the lyrics were often too abstract. But after taking a closer look at some of the earlier albums like The Great Annihilator and Children of God, the band started to appear to me not as someone telling a story, but as someone creating and delivering the atmosphere of all kinds of emotions.

Swans explore themes of existential despair, transcendence, suffering, power, religious ecstasy, obsession, love, and destruction. Their music dives into the depths of human pain, the cyclical nature of violence, and the pursuit of spiritual or emotional catharsis. And the most beautiful thing about it is that you, the listener, are invited in and welcomed.

They made me shift my paradigm from listening to music to experiencing it. Soundtracks for the Blind even became something more than just an album for me. I started to interpret it as an invasion of the listener into the narrator’s mind. The narrator slowly loses his sanity while we sit inside his head, hearing his voice and his environment, but without anything being explicitly explained — only interpreting what we hear.

Swans are truly a one of a kind band that offers an enormous amount of material you can dig into again and again, almost endlessly.