A few long and heavy years ago, Swirlpool stopped us dead in our tracks with “Spinning In Reverse”, a shoegaze tidal wave that instantly felt like a modern classic in the genre. The German band has been relatively quiet ever since, releasing a stand-along single in 2021 (“Cinnamon Sun”) and allowing their previous material to dutifully fill our ears and playlists.
This week, Swirlpool return with a blissful and voluminous vengeance, unleashing an expansive and dramatic new single called “Reimagine,” which adeptly balances both dream-pop and post-rock in its sonic DNA, and it lyrically may shed some light on the distance between new music releases.
“The single was one of the first ideas Tom [Fischer] came up with on rhythm guitar,” the band states. “The lyrics deal with our sometimes too perfectionistic songwriting process, where we would spend days writing new interesting parts and sometimes just get stuck in a loop. It is about the agony of slow change and the need for re-invention.”
However long and winding the road that led us to “Reimagine,” it was certainly worth the wait. Swirlpool’s sound is timeless in its quality, and the relative lack of quantity only helps magnify what we have before us. It turns, however, out we won’t be waiting another three years for more of Swirlpool’s reverb and distortion-heavy sounds; “Reimagine” is the first taste of new album Distant Echoes, set to arrive in March.
Crank it up via Spotify below, and catch a visual sight of the band through the Daniel Dueckminor-directed video below, filmed on the grounds of an abandoned military barracks.
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