The Swell Season
Forward
Masterkey Sounds / Plateau Records
Sixteen years may seem like a lifetime in music, but for The Swell Season, time has been less an interruption than a slow bloom. With Forward, their third studio album and first since 2009’s Strict Joy, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová return not with bombast, but with an elegy to evolution, a whisper-turned-hymn about what it means to move on while holding what matters close. It is, in every way, a homecoming, not to a place, but to a feeling. And it is quietly magnificent.
The album opens with the gentle toll of “Factory Street Bells,” and immediately the listener is reminded why this duo captured hearts so completely nearly two decades ago. Hansard’s voice is fuller now, burnished with the richness of lived experience, singing of fatherhood and the gentle ache of time. Irglová’s piano flutters like light through lace curtains; tender, reverent, and unshakably present. It’s a prayer dressed as a song, an invocation of what’s to come.
But this isn’t an album content to merely echo the past. As its title promises, Forward moves, not frantically, but with clarity and grace. “Great Weight” pulses with a rare buoyancy, a rhythmic shimmer that lifts Hansard’s lyrics about surrender and freedom. The production, subtle yet luminous, allows space for breath, for the kind of silences that speak louder than words.
Throughout, there is a delicate interplay between movement and stillness. “Stuck In Reverse” aches with Hansard’s trademark rasp, raw and close to the bone, while Irglová’s arrangements tether the song to something deeper, a balm for its bruised core. “People We Used To Be” is its natural sibling, a meditation on memory and metamorphosis. These are not songs of longing, but of looking gently into the mirror and choosing love over lament.
There is no artifice here, only presence. The record was birthed in Irglová’s Icelandic home studio, with families nearby, collaborators old and new at hand, and a spirit of intimacy that seeps into every track. Piero Perelli’s percussion offers texture and tact, never rushing, always listening. The result is music that feels as though it’s lived in your bones forever, even on first listen.
And in the quiet act of co-creation, this “catch,” as Irglová calls it, lies the soul of Forward. Each song is a passing of light between two souls who have grown, separately and together. Their harmonies don’t just blend; they trust. They listen.
The Swell Season offers something rarer and more nourishing: a reconnection rooted in respect, grace, and evolution, in a world so often obsessed with returns and reunions framed as spectacles. Forward is less a comeback than a continuation, the next honest chapter in a story still being written with care.
And so, with unhurried hearts and luminous simplicity, The Swell Season reminds us: the way forward isn’t loud. It’s open. And it’s beautiful.
