#future ruins

[orchidblack]

I had hoped this was teasing another apocalyptic science fiction concept album, but the prospect of a Reznor-curated festival is still plenty cool. Put me down for a shirt.

[snippybaby]

From an interview with Trent Reznor about the Future Ruins Festival.

Would you like to do an escape room with Trent Reznor?

Yes

No

Voting ended onMay 24, 2025

[mannyblacque]

Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor

photo via Flood Magazine | Instagram

[captainpirateface]

GOD DAMN! I wish I could go to this!!!!!

[rustyginger]

Recently acquired. got it at the show. A great band, incapable of making bad music.

[bappychaps]

Swervedriver - 'Future Ruins'

CD - 2019 Dangerbird Records

[dustedmagazine]

Swervedriver — Future Ruins (Dangerbird)

Photo by Steve Gullick

Swervedriver was always a bit too heavy and abrasive to fit neatly into the shoegazer scene. Early singles like “Son of Mustang Ford,” off the 1991 album Raise bucked and reared wildly, more akin to American post-grunge outfits like Dinosaur Jr. or Sonic Youth than dream-fuzzed Oxford neighbors like Ride. Mezcal Head in 1993 layered a narcotic buzz of vocals over inflammatory riffs—the guitars in “Duel” are monstrous, blistered and radiant—noisily obliterating any gestures towards pop. When the band came to America, it toured with amps-up sludge rockers Soundgarden and Smashing Pumpkins. Even the band’s radical turn to pop, Ejector Seat Reservation, had a howling entropy under the melodies, far more so than Teenage Fanclub who seem the closest relation.

Swervedriver broke up in 1998, but like many bands of similar vintage, reunited in the aughts first at the 2008 Coachella festival and later in a series of tours. In 2015, Swervedriver released its first post-reunion albums, I Wasn’t Born to Lose You. Dusted appears not to have reviewed the disc, but the Quietus summed up the positive but not rapturous reception, saying, “All in all, there is freshness and intrigue for those that need it—and for those that don't, a reliable consistency with their 90s incarnation. The new Swervedriver may be clean and sentimental, but the ‘petroleum spirit’ of their youth still keeps its pace.”

Future Ruins, then, is Swervedriver’s second post-break-up album, reconvening four long-time members—Adam Franklin, Jimmy Hartridge, Steve George and Mikey Jones—for a very recognizable iteration of the band’s sound. It’s quite good, though, of course, wildly out of sync with what’s going on in music right now. If you ever liked Swervedriver, you’ll like this a lot.

“Marywinter,” the single, starts with a thump and bash of cymbals, the drums drawing hard-edges around billowing atmospheres of sound. Franklin’s soft murmuring voice slips in and out of the mix, like a tendrils of seaweed getting pulled down into surf. There are hard, prickly sounds—a woozy MBV-like guitar pull-off, a squall of bass—jutting out from the roil of sound, but the effect is calming, a white noise rush of static colored with melody.

Elsewhere, Swervedriver waxes contemplative, as in the slower paced title cut, and the dreaming closer, “Radio-Silent.” “Everybody’s Going Somewhere” slips off the leash a bit, with spoken word vocals set against chilled translucencies of guitar and electric keyboards; it sounds more delicate and interior-facing than the large-scale bangers. Yet even these have a tranquility within the roar. “Golden Remedy” hazards a saw-toothed guitar riff, hard and rough and stinging. But the melody laps around it like a sea of codeine. You know it probably hurts but you can’t feel it from inside this cloud of calm.

None of this is so very different from Swervedriver’s catalog, or indeed from the guitar-crashing dream pop of Adam Franklin’s Bolts of Melody, but it is very fine anyway. In these latter days of everything available at once, what’s the point of linear progression anyway? Music is music, always crowding around us. If it sounds good, why not? And indeed, “Good Times are Hard to Follow” sounds pretty damned good with its banging, squealing guitars, its whipped-cream-fog-bank mass of vocals. In it, Franklin contemplates history, singing perhaps of a love affair, perhaps of a life in music, “I love the way it starts, but I hate the way it ends, the end denies the start of its sense.”

Not yet it doesn’t. Not by a long shot.

Jennifer Kelly

[musicalhitchhiker]

Swervedriver – Mary Winter

İngiliz shoegaze topluluğu Swervedriver, 1998 ve 2008 yılları arasında ara verip, 17 yıl aradan sonraki ilk albümünü ise 2015’te paylaşmıştı. Bunu takiben 25 Ocakta Future Ruins albümünü yayınlayacak olan Swervedriver’ın, hayatın nasıl olduğunu hatırlamaya çalışan bir uzay adamını anlattığı Mary Winter şarkısı paylaşıldı.