Metal
Charlotte Wessels releases “Mute Swan Empire” on 5 February 2027 through Napalm Records, credited to The Obsession: the title of her 2024 album has become the name of the band that has toured with her these past years. It runs to fifteen songs.
It is a character-driven concept record, and each track inhabits one archetype: figures that emerge at the end of the Anthropocene and meet ecological and social collapse with denial, rage, faith, blind obedience, withdrawal, selective empathy, hope or vengeance. “I didn’t set out to write a concept record from the start, but somewhere along the way, I began to realize that all the latest songs I’d written were connected,” says the former Delain singer. “What fascinates me is how easy it is to recognize these responses in others, and how much harder it can be to recognize them in ourselves. I didn’t want an album that simply points fingers or offers easy answers.”
The title draws on the myth of the swan song. “What if we don’t get one?” Wessels asks. “What if we’ve pushed ourselves so close to ecological and social collapse that we’ve lost, or no longer deserve, that final act of grace?”
A fair amount of the text is not hers. “In Leta Via” carries words by Hildegard of Bingen and “The Hermit Song” by Julian of Norwich; “Emergency Kit” takes text from “Denk Vooruit”, the Dutch emergency-preparedness campaign; “One Day They Will Come For You” draws on Martin Niemöller’s post-war prose, and “Bells Of Lynn” on a Longfellow poem.
She produced it with Joost Van Den Broek at Sandlane Recording Facilities, with Elianne Anemaat on cello and orchestral arrangements by Vikram Shankar. The band’s first headline tour opens on 4 February in Sint-Niklaas and closes on the 27th in Utrecht, with Ad Infinitum’s Melissa Bonny as support: there is no Spanish date. Before that, in December, they play Brazil and Argentina.
Since 2020 Wessels has released a new song every month through her Patreon, and the ones she picks end up on the albums. The oldest on “Mute Swan Empire” is “Incantations”, which first appeared there in March 2024.
Text by Roger Estivill