Stream: Swervedriver, ‘Mary Winter’ and ‘Drone Lover’

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Swervedriver (Photo by Steve Gullick)
Swervedriver (Photo by Steve Gullick)

One reason we’re looking forward to 2019: Resurgent U.K. rockers Swervedriver continue to be … well, resurgent.

Underappreciated in the 1990s, during which they released four albums, the Oxford, U.K., band burned brightly on the fringes of the British shoegazer movement and the U.S. alternative rock scene while being fully embraced by neither. They went their separate ways in 1998. But during the Swervies’ silent years the band’s legend grew, as their self-described “space travel rock ’n’ roll” — characterized by the propulsive guitar squalor of principals Adam Franklin and Jimmy Hartridge — continued to be cited as an influence for a younger generation of axe-wielders.

They reunited for a memorable gig at Coachella 2008, with that momentum finally building to the 2015 release of “I Was Born to Lose You,” their first full-length in 17 years. It was an album that built on, rather than Xeroxed, the blissful fury of the Swervies’ first go-round, and was embraced thusly. Last fall brought the news that Swervedriver had something new in the works, and that album, “Future Ruins,” will be out an. 25 via L.A.-based Dangerbird Records.

Recorded at MAKE Records Studio in L.A. and Seaside Studios in Brighton, U.K., “Future Ruins” superimposes a dim and cautionary worldview — “a rage at the state of the world,” Franklin says — onto the band’s jet blasts of guitars. Three singles have emerged so far. “Drone Lover” offers a heavy, melancholic declamation of technology; album opener “Mary Winter” revisits the quartet’s outer space themes (“Been floatin’ out here so long / And you know I’m not coming down”); and simply the title “The Lonely Crowd Fades in the Air” might be the best answer yet for the question “What is social media?” In the latter, Franklin muses “We’ve stumbled into the end of days / Where the future comes home to cry,” and if the end times are nigh, it’s best to go down with Swervedriver turned up to 11.

||| Stream: “Drone Lover” and “Mary Winter”

||| Also: Watch the video for “The Lonely Crowd Fades in the Air”