NOTE: All photos are copyright of Dean Keim 2026
90’s hard shoegazing greats Swervedriver came through the NYC area for a couple of shows for their Thirty Five Years of Raise Tour where they are playing their 1991 debut album Raise as well as sporting a brand-new single. It was almost 12 years ago when this band last swept through with a big reunion fervor and a new album, playing what seemed to be every small to medium capacity venue in the city from Saint Vitus and Mercury Lounge to Music Hall of Williamsburg and Bowery Ballroom. Just over a decade later things have changed drastically on the music scene. A perfect example is that these shows were sponsored by BrooklynVegan, a local music news outlet which is presently in the process of being gutted by their owners and has an uncertain future, and the two area venues they are playing, Jersey City’s White Eagle Hall across the Hudson River and Brooklyn’s Music Hall of Williamsburg are both being sold off to developers, putting their futures in very precarious situations as well.
Swervedriver originally rose up through the music scene in Oxford, UK in the late 80’s and played a big role in the indie music explosion that occurred in the early 90’s, but they did manage to stand apart from shoegazing peers like Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine with their use of heavy effect pedals for the heaviest sound textures and their added flares of driving post punk rock catchiness instead of droning walls of sound enticed more people to their jams especially here in the States. They didn’t even like being labelled shoegaze and preferred to be known as a hard rock act instead since they were more influenced by late-1960s garage rock bands like The Stooges, MC5, and 13th Floor Elevators, whereas their modern contemporaries, bands like Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth, seemed to be more tied to raw artsy psych sounds. This helped make Swervedriver more accessible to the garage-loving grunge scene here in the US. I happened to see a surprise free Dinosaur Jr. set earlier in the day at Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan and I certainly felt that connection between their sounds through the day. Swervedriver’s jam-obsessed label Creation Records had its own problems in the mid-90’s, and the band switched labels multiple times trying to find a home that fit in the later part of the decade. They also switched up some members along the way, with only the two guitarists, Jimmy Hartridge and singer Adam Franklin, staying on as consistent members before ultimately breaking up in 1998. About a decade later in 2008 they starting playing again and, before long, they had a grand reunion brewing. Why it took them so long to get back to playing again is anyone’s guess, but it was great to hear to hum of their pedal effects once again ringing in my ears and coursing through my bloodstream.
A group called The Still Out opened the show, the band seemingly reformed specifically for this tour. They were formed by producers Josh Stoddard and Arjun “Arj” Agerwala in the late 2000’s, but Stoddard died in 2021 and Agerwala is now reforming the band and issuing a remastered and expanded version of their lost 2008 album Crystallized in tribute to his former bandmate. This release did feature Swervedriver’s Adam Franklin, who was clearly a driving figure in its revival, so it made sense that they would play in support of this tour. Agerwala was joined by a huge band of players from the local music scene like Chris Enriguez (from the band Spotlights) on drums, Julie Rozansky (from F You Tammy and Power Pose) on bass , and Atsuo Matsumoto (from The Day Offs) on guitar. They played a lot of songs from that re-release, but I particularly liked their mid-set inclusion of a cover of Stereolab’s “French Disko”, setting the tone for their sound, and the whole show had a fittingly heavy shoegaze vibe that really created a proper mood.
Click on photos to enlarge
The second band on the bill was Slow Fiction, a group of musical vagabonds that settled in Brooklyn recently. This unit is fronted by enchanting vocalist Julia Vassallo, backed by guitarists Paul Knepple and Joseph Skimmons, bassist Ryan Duffin, and drummer Akiva Henig. They are definitely driven by a late 90’s alternative sound with a moody veneer. They played in almost complete darkness with only a little glow of backlight which made them particularly hard to photograph, but much like when you settle into their music, they become very easy to see through the shadow with a sound that is very ominously familiar to the largely older crowd that came for this show. They just released their debut album dollhouse, and it feels like you’ll be seeing a lot more of these shadowy characters in the future.
Click on photos to enlarge
In stark contrast to the dark set of the previous band, Swervedriver played with a bright and colorful projected video show, bathing the stage in hypnotic images and pulsating light. Along with founding members Jimmy Hartridge and Adam Franklin, the longtime rhythm section backbone of the band consisted of drummer Mikey Jones (of the Bolts of Melody and the Brooklyn synthpop act Heaven) and bassist Mick Quinn (formerly of another Oxford band Supergrass). Starting with the ominous Twin Peaks theme (a surreal show that did start around the same time as this disc came out), with little chatter or stories about the songs in between tracks, they launched right into the full album in order. Then they played a second set of deeper cuts like the B-Sides “Juggernaut Rides” and “Out”, other hits from their old days, especially some favs from their second album 1993’s Mezcal Head, and their new song “Flawed” which definitely harkened to their old classic sound, closing the show with “Duel.” There were some missed starts and the occasional missteps, but they always caught right back up, getting to the heart of the jam. The whole show was such an ethereal delight that I couldn’t have been happier after the performance. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another decade for these guys to come back around.
Click on photos to enlarge
