Available on: Rough Trade / Secretly Canadian LP

True misery demands a withdrawal from the world and its innate beauty. In order to be properly depressed, you need to be self-indulgent, and to do that, you need a suspension of reality. So performers, such as Antony Hegarty, who make inherently sad music, don’t make music that’s connected to reality. They need to create their own world in order to crawl away from the real one.

Which means that despite being undeniably fascinating, the music can be hard to like. And on Swanlights, his latest album, Antony withdraws into his own world as never before. ‘Everything is New’, the opening track, and a blatant musical and lyrical statement of splitting from the past, starts with him mumbling the same lyric over and over before, and eventually moaning, which sounds much more beautiful. When Antony tries to say something he falls down, but when he tries to exude plaintive sadness he knows just how to do it right.

‘Thank You for Your Love’ is a lot like the cover of ‘Crazy In Love’ that Antony did a few years ago. It’s a prayer of gratitude that so perfectly expresses the feeling of pathetic, dogged love for someone who’s empirically better than you when love becomes obsession that borders on madness. All Antony says is “thank you for your love” over and over again for most of the song. He then complicates things, adding “when I was falling in a seizure of pain”, but then the song gets faster, and Antony simply repeats his grateful pleading, and all extraneous circumstances about his mind being “in a thousand pieces” are forgotten; all he wants to offer is thanks. Thus, the song becomes obsessive rather than complimentary.

The album constantly sounds like it’s on the brink of collapse. The title track is a mess of ambient loops with Antony telling us he “sees faces in his dreams” whilst a piano trills up and down around these words. Occasionally the melody completely collapses into nothing but Antony’s voice, only then to become more steady after having time to recover. And this kind of thing happens time and again.

He loves a good moan, does Antony. He moans like a dying whore all over this record. There is more moaning than you’d find at a Mediterranean funeral. He can’t resist it. Every track contains his wordless moaning at one point or other. He risks becoming over-dependent on it but you sometimes get the sense that he can’t find words for what he’s feeling. It’s his equivalent of doo-wops or the Beatles’ head-squirming “oohs”; it’s what he does when there is nothing to say but a statement of who he is.

Swanlights is less consolidated as a whole album than The Crying Light, my favourite Antony album. It’s a more faltering, nervous record. The lyrics are simpler and the songs blend into one another. Perhaps it’s in fact a more genuine expression of fear and trembling than anything Antony has done previously. It’s an uncomfortable record, and the fact that it sounds more personal than anything he’s done before is really saying something.

Remember the way Antony sang, “there’s a ghost on the horizon” on ‘Hope There’s Someone’? It didn’t sound like a person singing that line, it sounded like it came from nowhere at all. But all these songs are unmistakably made by a single person. Listening to them feels like leaning down and peering through a peep hole into someone’s private world. On this album Antony behaves as we all do when we’re truly on our own; pottering about, singing little snatches of songs rather than full, operatic works of wonder. In that sense, it’s like Arthur Russell. Whereas with other Antony records what was impressive was the sheer intensity of it all, in this it’s just the sense of voyeurism we get from seeing someone at their most vulnerable.

James Hampson