Oxygen

Oxygen begins with a gnarly bass riff that anchors Swans' meditation on breath itself. The track moves from simple repetition of the word, a mantra of relief, "I can breathe again", into something more turbulent, the lyrics fragmenting into visceral imagery of bodies under duress. Michael Gira draws on a personal struggle with asthma, transforming a physiological crisis into something ritualistic and almost ecstatic. The song builds toward an explosive finale, guitar and brass colliding in waves of shocking intensity. What starts as a plea for oxygen becomes something wilder: a demand, a theft, a kind of possession. Gira's voice moves between whisper and shout, between the mundane and the mythic, collapsing the distance between bodily need and spiritual hunger. The result is a track that treats breathing not as background noise but as an act of defiance.