Yeah Yeah Yeahs Singer Karen O Among Guests on New Swans Album

Post-punk legends the Swans have recruited Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer Karen O and members of fellow indie acts Low and Akron/Family to contribute to their forthcoming double album ‘The Seer,’ which is due out this summer on frontman Michael Gira’s Young God Records. It is the much-anticipated follow-up to the band’s 2010 comeback album, ‘My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky.’

‘The Seer’ will feature “Beach Boys-style harmonies” from Karen O and her fellow collaborators. ”It’s a really, varied record. There’s some pretty intense moments, sonically, but there’s also some very pastoral and beautiful moments,” Gira tells Spin.com. “Some of the songs are 30 minutes long. To me it’s the complete synthesis of everything I’ve done and Swans has done, including a lot of [previous project with Akron/Family] Angels of Light influences as well.”

He continues: “The band has been playing live for a year and we’re all really connected. This is the best lineup Swans has ever had in terms of getting along and really working for the same goal. It’s been very positive.”

Active from 1982 through 1997 and again since reuniting in 2010, the Swans are known as one of the most caustic, sonically aggressive and experimentally intense bands of the ’80s underground, with a reputation for live performances so loud that they would often clear rooms. But despite (or perhaps because of?) the aggressively anti-commercial stance and a constantly changing lineup behind mastermind Gira, little has stemmed the tide of their gradual evolution from a shunned underground act to cult favorites, and the addition of Karen O only solidifies this.