Festival Review: Swordes At Footsteps Festival
At MOTH Club, Swordes transformed a tiny Monday night crowd into something euphoric and uncanny, delivering a performance where glitchy hyperpop and analogue experimentation collided in real time.
When Swordes took to the stage at MOTH club this week, it began as an understated affair. A small table beside her holds a groovebox, a synth, a sampler, using which she builds up every beat and mixes live. This party trick is her speciality, creating a distinct sound where acid-trance meets gazey hyperpop. The stage is dark save for its trademark golden tinsel fringe, so Swordes sets her phone torch under a bottle of Fiji water to create a makeshift lamp, whose glow creates rippling shadows on her face and the ceiling above. Just a couple of months ago, planning applications made in 2024 that could have shut the venue down were denied. It’s been two years of petitioning and persuading, and though further applications may still be made, the win has left every MOTH event feeling like somewhat of a celebration. Tonight is no exception.
Swordes opens with an unreleased track, telling us we’ll hear it when the album- Cultural Pirate Music- is out. She follows it up with masterful slow build ‘No Return’, with a swirling, swampy sound and gentle angelic vocals. It has a flavour of Grimes’ Oblivion in both vocal pitch and reverb, but with a clear difference: while Grimes pledges allegiance to the computerised, striving to transcend her humanness and offering her art up to AI, Swordes favours the analogue. Her performances are computer-free, showing a mastery and dedication that’s projected her name out of the downtown warehouse and onto an international stage. The result is a comprehensive delivery of an evidently strong vision: saturated colours with undiluted, electrified sound. There are a couple of technological hitches, but they only add to the charm.
The crowd are, immediately, under some kind of spell. They dance as though they itch, all limbs and joints. It’s like the tank of Modelo has been spiked and I wasn’t invited to sample. They don’t care that it’s a grey Monday, they don’t care who they elbow in the face repeatedly (me), they don’t care that there’s only a cluster of twenty, maybe twenty-five of us. In that room, everything is electric. When she tells us she’s from New York, they cheer as though a celebrity has been mentioned. When Swordes asks everyone to come closer, they do so before she even finishes the sentence, clustering together beneath her. They know exactly what they are here to see.
The set feels divinely anachronistic, like Swordes has been splitting her time between the ten-years-past hipster-stroke-creative era, and whatever scene we have to look forward to in another decade. This is not to say she has her references twisted. It’s clear that the soundscape for her upcoming album is precisely honed. The second unreleased song she plays is so brilliant that it’s easy to imagine it propelling her into the indie sleaze darline top spot before the year is out. It has a bold 80s synth, bridging Massive Attack and She Wants Revenge, but with Swordes’ sermonic vocals trilling on top, earning the comparisons to FKA Twigs.
Beyond anything, the gig is exciting. Dressing like a pirate shipwrecked in SWAG subculture-era Brooklyn, Swordes cuts through the reproductions with style and substance. This enthusiastic clash is what makes her so special. She wears yellow green highlighter ballet flats that she takes off halfway through the set, a black tutu that reaches her shins, a wide cream rhinestone belt, an electric blue tank top, and a set of pearls wrapped around her neck too many times to count, that bounce with her so much so that she has to wrap them around again. Partway through the set, she remembers the pink fluffy tricorne hat at the edge of the stage, and putting it on appears to bring her further into herself. Maybe it’s the haircut, maybe it’s the impression that she has stumbled onto the stage to unearth a God-given talent without realising she had it, but she casts an image of Karen O under the strobe.
‘Mothamor’, played halfway through the set, is another meticulously concocted psychotropic beat, that sounds as if it came to Swordes in a dream, followed up by ‘Boyfriend la la la’, a more playful track to balance out the ethereality of the night. Though some of her kit harks back to early 2000s production, Swordes’ sound remains forward-pushing and tensile. With her video game sound and outfits that evoke a day well spent on the character customisation screen, her projects carry a sense of freedom that can only be achieved by a woman in her twenties, in her bedroom. Her performance leaves you feeling as though you’re in a friend's loft in Brooklyn, possibly the US equivalent to Bass Victims’ afters incantations.
On her final and most popular track, Finally Found!, vocals echo alongside a glitchy bass line and what sounds like a pan flute. In the lyrics, Swordes laments her own nature. Though it could easily be self-chastisement, the song feels more like pulling mess into a heedless dancefloor embrace; there is a moment where you have to accept your own disorientation and live alongside it. The track’s final bars could be described as wailing were they not so precise. Rather than crashing down, the beat switch invites you to stay dissolved. It’s out-of-body, it’s disconnecting, and it’s promising of a strong career to come.
There’s a Bambi-leggedness to this audience, as though many of its members are new to live music and their place in it. This set in particular is a safe home for new gig-goers; Swordes is consistently sweet, thanking everyone for coming and complimenting the crowd members closest to her. When she reveals that her set is over, unceremoniously, much like her songs, the audience doesn’t seem to understand and continues to stand expectantly until she says, ‘I’m going for a cigarette’, and leaves the stage.
Conversations around young people and their behaviours today betray a lot of concern for them. This has always been the case, but our current discussions have an extra projection- if I’m this addicted to my phone, if I feel this disconnected, they must be worse. What I see time and time again is that for young people, subculture, connection, and artistry are alive and well. This sort of gig proves exactly why grassroots music venues like MOTH Club are so precious for young people establishing themselves, experimenting with fashion, finding their feet in the scene, and building entirely new ones. In a space like this, it’s easy to think that just maybe the kids are alright.