The new Swervedriver album is titled Future Ruins. As singer Adam Franklin notes: “There’s 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 who’s trying to remember what life is really like. Also, it could be about somewhere in the world where winter isn’t like the winter here. A sunny place, but it’s December or January and you’re trying to remember winter. Something’s going on.” This week the UK quartet released another single off the album “Drone Lover.” Swervedriver’s new album Future Ruins, comes out January 25th via Dangerbird Records.

That something began in October 2017, with a two-week stint with Franklin, Hartridge, Mikey Jones (drums) and Mick Quinn (bass) tracking at MAKE Records Studio in Los Angeles. Having made I Wasn’t 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. “That’s a good way to record,” says Adam, “because you’ve literally just seen the whites of the audience’s eyes and you’re thinking, ‘If that audience from last night were here now…’ You can’t 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 Wilco’s 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 Swervedriver’s fabled widescreen escapism, but with a tension that echoes a sleeve image of Coney Island in skeletal monochrome (from an original photo by Spencer Bewley), like a post mortem photograph of a failed utopia. The title song offers a grim assessment of humanity’s current condition: “We are ruled by fools/These are future ruins/That the king is insane/Is now old news.”

Adam Franklin on “Drone Lover”

“I have no recollection of where this tune came from. It’s a song that’s been knocking around for a few years, but for some reason had never been presented to anyone until we were in the studio this time and I clicked play on the demo while searching for something else. TJ and Mikey both went “what’s this?” and then “so why aren’t we recording it?” – and so we recorded it. The lyric mentions love but it’s really about war – remote war and killing from a distance whilst chomping on last night’s leftover pizza or something.”

on Swervedriver:

So space travel rock’n’roll: it still applies. “Sometimes I think we’re deceptively complicated, which is better than being the other way around!” Adam laughs. “I love being back in this band. We’re playing places that we’ve either not played in a long time, or new places like Singapore, where there were 20 year old kids there and they’re singing the words to the new songs… We don’t want to be the band that just plays the old albums. We’re glad to have a whole bunch of new songs. We’re on it again.”

Swervedriver
Future Ruins
tracklisting

1 Mary Winter
2 The Lonely Crowd Fades In The Air
3 Future Ruins
4 Theeascending
5 Drone Lover
6 Spiked Flower
7 Everybody’s Going Somewhere & No-One’s Going Anywhere
8 Golden Remedy
9 Good Times Are So Hard To Follow
10 Radio-Silent