There’s a bleak mystery to be unpacked in Swelt’s music. An eerie, old worldiness found under the mumbling vocals and subtle, varied instrumentation that continues the trend of genre-pushing post-rock that’s swept the UK in the last decade. Nothing is spoken or played without consideration, each second of each track taking a moment to reflect.
Contemplative, deliberate and elegantly scant — Swelt’s brand of sparse slowcore is a direct reaction to the four-piece’s experiences playing in shouty punk bands and free-form ensembles. Crafting dense tracks independently from their bases across Bristol, London and Birmingham, they’ve been writing intimate, enveloping post-rock with tinges of low-fi americana and experimental indie-folk since their inception in 2019. On their latest album Bones, tracks like Red Gorsen see haunting slide guitars sneak into view, as the band swells into a raw, bleak explosion of melancholy.
I sat with guitarist Chris Hicks and bassist Anthony Brown to discuss the new album, the experience of recording in rural Scotland and where their contemplative music finds a home in the shouty, dancy Bristol scene.
What was the process of Swelt coming together?
Chris: We did a couple of practices with me, our singer (Reuben Brunt), and our drummer Alex, and then Anthony quickly came in. Because we started off in lockdown we spent quite a long time writing independently and finding a sound before we played our first gig.
Anthony: Yeah, when I came in, Reuben had sent me some tracks, just him on the guitar, asking me to add some bass. It felt semi fully formed already. They definitely had from the outset an ideology of not wanting to be loud and ostentatious, so it was quite interesting walking into a quite peaceful, calm and serene environment in a practice room compared to my other bands where it’s always been loud and chaotic.
Do you feel like this slow patient approach to how you formed as a band is something that’s reflected in your sound?
Anthony: I think so, yeah. I think there’s got to be something in the fact that these guys all knew each other for quite a while and have it in their personalities as well, just being quite level-headed in a way. I think that comes out in terms of the way we approach constructing the music and bringing our ideas in and hearing each other out. There’s no mentality of someone dictating everything, even though we do have Reuben leading. We all bring in ideas and sometimes have almost fully formed tracks but we’ll sort of pull them apart and deconstruct them a bit to make them more in line with what we want.
Chris: I think that’s really apparent on the album, and I think that’s one way I’d say all of us are really pleased. The first two EPs, it’s maybe a bit more of a mix.
Anthony: Yeah, I think it sort of started out (on the first couple of EPs) as being maybe Reuben, the singer, would come in with like a skeleton of a song that he’d made and then we would rearrange and flesh it out. But on the album there’s quite a few where we completely pulled the initial idea apart and the final result doesn’t really resemble what he came in with. And then there’s a few tracks that came entirely from the practice room.
What were your major influences for the new album?
Anthony: It feels more like a unified vision per se compared to maybe some of the previous stuff. We always had similar influences that we all shared things like Low, Psychosis and bands like that. There’s a track called Cut Out and I don’t think there’s anything like that on our previous EPs where it’s a lot more splintered and we’re exploring dynamics we wouldn’t have without those influences.
Chris: We did also have a discussion prior to recording as when the four of us started playing together we had quite a strong idea of what we wanted to do: keeping a lot of space and restraint in the music. I think we made our first EP with that in mind, it was very minimalist and recorded live with minimal overdubs. On the second EP we started exploring with multi-layered vocal harmonies and just throwing more stuff at it which took it in a slightly different direction. We’ve kind of gone back to…
Anthony: The original ethos.
Chris: Yeah, the kind of beginning of the ethos. So it kind of feels like a bit…
Anthony: Full circle.
Chris: Yeah. We recorded at a place called Lamego Bay Studios in Skerry, on the very far north coast of Scotland, with a producer called Jamie Lockhart, who plays in a band called Mi Mye, which is kind of quite similar to Swelt. He co-runs a studio in Leeds called Greenmount Studios and Reuben and I know him from recording a couple of albums with him in our old band Talons. He introduced us to Sparklehorse and Songs: Ohia and stuff like that. He’d just happened to have built this studio on his parents farm, a tiny sort of half-built shack.
Anthony: So we went and spent a week of intensive recording in the middle of nowhere. It was pretty and it just totally suited the mood of the tracks and the ideas that we had. It was the perfect environment to bring all that together without distractions, just surrounded by nature and feeling like you’re at the end of the world. You could just look out at the wide expanses and, yeah, that just fit the kind of feeling. It’s quite vulnerable music at times.
Would you say there’s a sense of escapism found on Bones?
Chris: I don’t want to speak for Reuben, but I get a kind of elemental, abstract, primal sense from his lyrics. I think he said he wanted to finish writing some of the lyrics when we were recording, a kind of holistic experience. So it feels like the stark landscape we recorded in is mirrored a little bit in some of the lyrics and musical approach.
Where do you see yourself within the Bristol scene? It feels like you stand out amongst the stereotype of Bristol post-punk, folk bands and dance music.
Anthony: I think it’s more of a reaction to that. In my mind anyway, just because… I guess, like you said, Bristol has that cliche of being associated with loud or noisy post-punk stuff. And being in my previous band, where it was quite loud, and I played in a free-form band as well – both of those things are a bit more Bristol cliche. So it felt more like, with Swelt, it was almost a conscious reaction to what was popular.
Chris: I know Reuben was quite into the idea of songwriting because in his previous band he was just a violinist and it was a new challenge for him. He hadn’t been a frontman before. It felt to me bit like we were out in our own world doing our own thing initially, so it was quite a nice surprise when we first started playing and there was bands like Quade and then Caroline. It felt like after the lockdown people in Bristol, what they’re into, had potentially changed. People were into more contemplative music than before. I feel we’re less overtly connected to the Bristol scene just because we’ve gigged in London more than Bristol.
Anthony: And we all live in different cities now as well. Me and Chris are still in Bristol at the minute, but then Reuben moved to London, Alex moved to Birmingham, so we’re all sort of a bit spread over at the minute. So that’s kind of… It meant we stopped doing as many Bristol gigs.
How does the distance impact your fluidity as a band? Is that reflected in the music at all and the way you record?
Anthony: I think it’s made us more focused. As a band we’ve always been pretty focused, but I think knowing we can’t just randomly arrange a practice the next week has made us organised, get our calendars a few months in advance. Sometimes we’ll have a meeting and organise about six months’ worth of practices just to make sure we’ve got a weekend clear. We wanted to be focusing on this material which became the album rather than just doing tons and tons of gigs. Maybe if we still all lived in the same city there might be more temptation to just be gigging a lot more, so it’s made us proactive in terms of creativity.
Tell me more about the recording experience.
Chris: I think we were the second album that he recorded in there, so he was still working out a lot of the kinks. Jamie’s attitude as a producer, he’s very open and collaborative, he doesn’t shut ideas down. If you come in with a sound and you say this is how my guitar sounds he won’t try and change what you’re doing. I think we were quite confident having done a bunch of recording before, but it also felt kind of playful, there was quite a lot of “I’m just gonna try something” and quite a lot of that off the cuff stuff actually ended up on the album. There was an open spirit to the whole thing.
Any gigs and singles we can expect to hear about soon?
Anthony: We’ve got a live session that we recorded a few weeks ago at the Book House in Bermondsey coming out in the next couple of weeks. Reuben messaged us today about a potential Windmill gig in London.
Anything you’ve been listening to lately you’d like to recommend?
Anthony: Well today I listened to an old Rex album and walking over I had Funkadelic on. Two very different ends of the spectrum.
Chris: Actually, I’ve been going back to Magnolia Electric Company quite a lot. There’s those benchmark albums that you always revisit that clearly have a lasting influence.
//Words: Jonathan Morris//