I was a teenager in the ’90s, fully immersed in the Alternative Nation explosion at the time, reading every music magazine I could get my hands on and exploring the wild, weird corners of the internet of the time for new sounds, and to my recollection I had never heard of Swallow. If I squint, the artwork to their 1992 debut album Blow maybe looks familiar, either from flipping past it in countless used CD shop bins or for its adherence to the 4AD/v23 house style, but I’m pretty sure I’d never heard it or heard of them, so the fact that the London duo’s one 20th century release was highly regarded enough to merit a deluxe reissue as part of 4AD’s reissue series is a surprise, but also an enticement to check out what I might have missed out on 30 years ago or so.

And while Blow was released before “shoegaze” was really an adjective, if it came out today it would definitely find a home in that musical subreddit. Louise Trehy and Mike Mason utilized drum machines, squalling guitars, and sweet, narcoleptic vocals to create a definite lo-fi, hazy vibe. It’s very, very ’90s but the ’90s are also very now, so it also feels as fresh as it does nostalgic.

According to the backstory, the band released Blow in July 1992 but were unhappy with the finished result and were able to get the label to release a remix EP called Blowback a few months later. The reissue, entitled Blown and out June 5, will combine these two releases into a single remastered edition and include the previously unreleased title track and a different version of the album opener “Lovesleep”; the two are also collected as a two-track digital entity called Sleepers if that’s how you roll. The reissue announcement also came with a video for the title track – here it is.

And as a sidenote, Swallow vocalist Louise Trehy continues to make music as Strata Florida and it was circa their 2021 single “Achilles” that she and Mason “made up” over whatever led to Swallow’s split, and he contributed to the tracks. They also planned “to see if there is anything worth releasing from the archives”… and here we are.