When SWANS announced their European tour, lots of people must have circled the dates in their calendar. This, being apparently the band’s farewell tour, added a sense of urgency that drove the show to eventually sell out completely. Not having any date in Finland, it’s far from an understatement to say that nearly half of the audience was coming from the northern neighborhood. A long queue formed quickly outside of the entrance to Paavli Kultuurivabrik on November 22nd, 2025, before the opening time.
As the venue quickly filled in, people had to wait few extra minutes before JESSICA MOSS, accompanying the main band in their European adventure, introduced herself on stage. She gave a touching message about how lucky we should all feel to be able to share these beautiful moments of live music. There are places ravaged by war where people can only dream of this kind of tranquility.
Promoting her latest solo album, “Unfolding”, Jessica entertained the audience for about 30 minutes with dreamy and melancholic violin melodies. The Canadian violinist and composer, using a minimalistic setup made of bells and chimes and a drone-y soundscape aiding the notes of her violin, carried the audience into a meditative, emotional, and almost mournful atmosphere. The fragility and solemnity of it all encompass the room filled with attentive fans.
After this deeply moving performance and a few moments of changeover, Michael Gira and his fellow members of SWANS made their entrance on stage among the cheers of the fans. It’s obvious how, as a leader of the band, he conducts and directs meticulously every moment and every detail of the performance, often playing turned towards his bandmates and carefully catching every nuance. It’s been a long tour (only a few shows remain after this one, culminating in two nights in Berlin, before each one goes back to their respective home), and it has taken a toll: Gira himself admitted after the round of shows in London a couple of weeks earlier that they would drop the “gentlest song” from the set as he could not perform the highest notes at his best any longer. Yet another proof of how seriously he takes his live performances.
In over two and a half hours of performance, the band entranced the audience completely, not counting the much-needed moments when trying to sneak out to the terrace to be able to breathe some fresh air. Almost like a cathartic experience, the band didn’t simply present their latest record: the seventeenth of an outstanding career — but offered a couple of new compositions as well, namely “The End of Forgetting” and “Newly Sentient Being,” at times nearly hypnotizing their fans. There were some small breaks between the songs, and for a moment you could feel a certain frustration in Gira‘s voice when requesting—unsuccessfully—to reduce the light on pointed to his lyrics sheets by a 10%. But the situation defused itself, and the music returned to be the protagonist once again. The meticulous directing from its mainman made sure the rest of the band was in unison, everyone paying attention to each other’s notes in orchestration. It takes a lot of concentration to perform such long songs, even when doing it nearly every night for many weeks in a row.
Eventually, after a warm introduction of all the other band members on stage, followed by the last bits of this beautiful performance, the show came to an end with continuous applause from the crowd. This got them split into those who queued for the cloakroom and those who queued at the merch stand, where Gira himself was going to show up to meet the fans and sign their records (but not before a satisfying after-show smoke).
After this “Valedictory Healing Energies” tour, apparently the band will not be playing live anymore, at least not in this iteration (we have seen in the spring Gira and Kristof Hahn touring together as duo, and maybe more of that or similar collaborations will come up in the future). If that’s the case, and this really is SWANS‘s “swan song”, the band definitely went out with dignity. For certain, we know there will be a live album out of the current tour, and that the frontman will be taking a break next year to see what the future brings for his career and the band itself. Personally we are glad we got to witness them in this form before the end. Check our photo gallery here…
JESSICA MOSS
SWANS
