Wiki
-
Release Date
23 June 2023
-
Length
11 tracks
The Beggar is the sixteenth studio album by American experimental rock band Swans. It was released on June 23, 2023, through Young God Records. The announcement of the album coincided with the release of its lead single, "Paradise Is Mine", as well as the announcement of a North American tour. The Beggar was preceded and funded by the acoustic demo album "Is There Really a Mind?" (2022).
Acoustic renditions of many of the album's then-unfinished tracks, primarily recorded by band leader Michael Gira alone at his home studio, appeared on the demo album Is There Really a Mind? which was released in February 2022. Material for the album was subsequently fleshed out and expanded through recording sessions that began at the Candy Bomber Studio in Berlin on May 2, 2022, and were then finalized that August.
Upon its release, The Beggar received mostly positive reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, it received an average score of 80, based on ten reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
Reviewing the album for AllMusic, Paul Simpson compared it favourably to the band's previous release; "For the most part, The Beggar builds on the sound of leaving meaning., though Gira is clearly interested in pushing the band into weirder territory again." and called it, "a riskier yet more successful effort that feels like a step in a more fulfilling direction."
Album descriptions on Last.fm are editable by everyone. Feel free to contribute!
All user-contributed text on this page is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.
