Future Ruins CD Autographed Digipak

CD Digipak is signed by Swervedriver.

The new Swervedriver album is titled Future Ruins, a two-word prcis of its dread thrills. It opens with Mary Winter, a song narrated by a recognizable Swervedriver archetype: a traveler, hurtling away from this world. Planet Earth long gone/And my feet wont touch the ground. But where is the traveler headed? And why? The second song, The Lonely Crowd Fades In The Air, offers some possible answers: Weve stumbled into the end of days/Where the future comes home to cry…

Theres a lot of foreboding on this album, agrees Adam Franklin. Space is in there a lot too. In the first song, the character is a spaceman whos trying to remember what life is really like. Also, it could be about somewhere in the world where winter isnt like the winter here. A sunny place, but its December or January and youre trying to remember winter. Somethings going on.

That something began in October 2017, with a two-week stint of tracking at MAKE Records Studio in Los Angeles. Having made I Wasnt Born To Lose You hard on the heels of an Australian tour, the band decided to repeat the process and bottle the momentum of a just-completed US tour performing both Raise and Mezcal Head in their entirety. Thats a good way to record, says Adam, because youve literally just seen the whites of the audiences eyes and youre thinking, If that audience from last night were here now You cant get too mellow. We came home with 30 different songs.

There quickly followed a further 10 days vocals and overdubs at Seaside Studios in Brighton. Stoking the creative energies was engineer TJ Doherty. A Grammy winner for his work on Wilcos A Ghost Is Born, his diverse credit list also includes Lou Reed and Steely Dan, Stephen Malkmus and Joanna Newsom, Sonic Youth and Selfish Cunt. But the band knew him in a previous life, from their first decade of existence. He was a fan, says Adam. We first met because he was down the front at all the gigs in New York and New Jersey a long lost time ago. He ended up going to engineering school and worked on all these cool records. The final 10 tracks were then mixed in spring 2018, as the band toured Europe again, infusing the recordings with road-slick fumes.

Future Ruins exhibits Swervedrivers fabled widescreen escapism, but with a tension that echoes a sleeve image of Coney Island in skeletal monochrome, like a post mortem photograph of a failed utopia. The title song offers a grim assessment of humanitys current condition: We are ruled by fools/These are future ruins/That the king is insane/Is now old news. That was an early lyric, I sang that one in LA, one of about three or four that I sang there, notes Adam. It just came out. A rage at the state of the world.

Theres more where that came from. Drone Lover, a song that predates the last album, is a comment on the depersonalized nature of 21st century techno-warfare. For all its melodys humming mood elevation, The Lonely Crowd Fades In The Air feels like an elegy, with one crushing couplet after another: Choose your colors wisely/Because things aint the same as in days gone by. That songs title it has a resonance that fits with these times, says Adam evokes the alienation wrought by the mass embrace of so-called social media; a perspective on our contemporary malaise thats also echoed in Everybodys Going Somewhere And No-Ones Going Anywhere, a spoken word dreamscape. Everybodys got the same amount of time on the planet, explains Adam. There might be a couple in Italy, 90 years old, theyve been married for 70, theyve never left the country, and they might possibly have had a better life than the person running around who gets a heart attack at 40 after earning 2 million dollars.

The trip ends with Radio-Silents ghostly seven-minute afterburn, its lyric comprising just 26 words: Were all so alone/And we all have to live as one/And we all must exist as one/And we all must resist as one. The track ends with police sirens and an electronic snap. Its loud, but its impotent rage, says Adam. Everything is completely fucked up. Theres no coming back from that one. So the journeys over, and yet Swervedriver ride on. Just as there was never any thought of I Wasnt Born To Lose You being a last hurrah for old times sake, Future Ruins presents a band moving with real time/real life vitality. It showcases new tricks and classic hallmarks: pop songs which dont have choruses, like Mary Winter; odd arrangements and weird contrasts, like Spiked Flowers rocknroll grind breaking out to acknowledge English landscape painter John Constable; and a lyric that references Echo & The Bunnymen. See if you can spot that one…

So space travel rocknroll: it still applies. Sometimes I think were deceptively complicated, which is better than being the other way around! Adam laughs. I love being back in this band. Were playing places that weve either not played in a long time, or new places like Singapore, where there were 20 year old kids there and theyre singing the words to the new songs We dont want to be the band that just plays the old albums. Were glad to have a whole bunch of new songs. Were on it again.