Later tonight in New York, this particular version of Swans will play together for the last time and then dissolve. Another version of Swans will follow, we are told, but has yet to take a form. Whatever that form, it’s impossible to imagine that it won’t have to live in the shadow of this extraordinary line-up, that it won’t be shaped by its gravity. It’s impossible not to see this as an ending rather than a beginning.

It seems like longer, but it’s a little more than seven years – 27th October 2010, to be precise – since I had my first encounter with this new Swans line-up, at the Concorde 2 in Brighton. I hadn’t been certain about going. I’d drifted away from them in the mid-nineties; I had no appetite at all for a trip down memory lane. I went mainly out of curiosity, my interest piqued by Michael Gira’s insistence that this would be something new and distinct. When Gira insists on something, it tends to happen.

That night, you could feel that they were still finding their way. The set was comparatively short, contained a scattering of old material, lacked a really decisive direction. The volume was moderate. Some lines were fluffed, tempers sometimes a little frayed. But in the extended opening of “No Words/No Thoughts” and the elements of what would eventually become “The Seer”, I found something elemental, something that I hadn’t realised I’d been attempting to live without. In those moments, they raised the tension in the room to the point where you couldn’t breathe and then sent it all crashing down again and again and again, pushing themselves to the edge of physical endurance, pushing themselves far beyond the point where any other, any lesser band would stop. In those brutal and ravishing moments, you could feel not diminishing echoes of the band they once were but the rising clamour of the band they would imminently become.

In the intervening years, I’ve seen them another nine times. That’s testament to Gira’s relentless work ethic as much as my own enthusiasm. There have been troughs as well as peaks: I recall an especially unsatisfying evening at the Electric in Brixton in 2014, at which the ear-splitting volume seemed to smother any subtlety, almost every key line was fluffed, and the set list appeared in dire need of a re-write. The overall effect was of a band in very steep decline. Less than a week later, they performed exactly the same set list in Brighton with such precise, furious force that you could feel the air trembling. It culminated in the crescendo of “Bring the Sun” which built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built, burning and ecstatic and utterly sexual, teetering on the edge, then finally collapsing spent and exhausted, gasping for air. It was fucking beautiful. A pure celebration of existence.

They could do that. Not always, but sometimes. And sometimes is better than never, which is what everyone else trades in. Those moments when it felt as if you were sharing the room with an exploding sun, when your body might disintegrate into atoms. Those moments when they’d start to bring the strands of an idea together from a spell of separated dissonance, when they’d suddenly catch a phrase or a movement and you’d think, “That. Right there. Just play that. Play it until it hurts me. Play it until it erases everything else. Play it until it buries us all.” And they would, and then some. Those moments when I’d close my eyes and meditate in the middle of the crowd, concentrating on breathing in and breathing out, lost completely in the here and now. They could do that, and I’ve rarely felt more alive.

A few more things I’ll remember always. A version of what possibly became “Screen Shot” which levitated and shimmered in a way that can only be described as gorgeous, redefining what this band was capable of, how lightly it might tread. The way that “A Little God In My Hands” became this unstoppable groove, brassed-up funk hammering down and down, another breathtaking redefinition. The conclusion of a spectacular show at London’s Koko, Gira bellowing revolutionary slogans and miming throat-slitting while his band did its utmost to strip the paint from the walls. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Gira leaning away from the microphone and out into the audience at the end of “Cloud of Unknowing” and singing gently to us as if clutching us to his chest, a lullaby, a redemption.

And best of all, that final London show at the Roundhouse. When they’d played there before, it had seemed a little too big for them, perhaps too much of a stretch to muster the required intensity in such a vast space. But somehow, at the second attempt, the sense of occasion lifted them to new heights, and perhaps the relative absence of work-in-progress did no harm too. They play for the customary two-and-a-half hours with such grace and power that it seems impossible to believe that it’s the last time; it feels as if every second is made to count, not a single note wasted. They’ve never been better. They’re about to end it all, and they’ve never been better.

And there it is. While everyone else was playing old albums in their entirety to the people who’d bought them in the first place, turning rock’n’roll into a museum with a particularly cynical gift shop, here was the alternative. Now thirty-five years old, Swans have not merely added to their substantial history and influence but have done their utmost to eclipse it, to render it irrelevant. In one key sense, they’ve succeeded: it used to be compulsory to begin every Swans review with tales of volume-induced vomiting and locked doors; they’ve escaped the pull of those apocryphal tales. They have existed in the moment; the moment has been their sole justification; they depart in the same spirit.

And finally, after all this time, Gira has had the audience he’s long deserved, one coming in search of the new and the undiscovered, one willing to listen and to experience. At the Roundhouse, only a couple of people push past on their way to or from the bar over the course of nearly two and a half hours. This, the last time we’ll be in a space with the most extraordinary live band we’ve ever witnessed…it’s far too precious for alcohol to blur, far too vital for distraction. We want to be overwhelmed one last time, to drown ourselves in the vastness of Swans’ engulfing tide. We’re not here to take pictures of it on our phones.

One last bow, then. Christoph Hahn. Thor Harris. Paul Wallfisch. Phil Puleo. Christopher Pravdica. Norman Westberg. He’s been Jayne Mansfield. And the curtain falls. And the space empties. And we wonder what can possibly fill it.

Ian Grant