By Des Cowley.
Hard to believe that The Necks – Chris Abrahams, Lloyd Swanton, Tony Buck – have been doing this for nearly forty-years. In that time, the trio’s music has never gotten old, or tired or jaded. How many bands can we say that about? What’s more, no-one will ever be heard saying: I like your old stuff better than your new stuff! Because, the simple fact is, The Necks – to adapt the words of Greek philosopher Heraclitus – never step into the same river twice.
Their career has been beyond reproach. They’ve never chased the limelight, bowed to any commercial imperative. Most people would struggle to identify them in a line-up. Instead, their trajectory has resembled a determined, dogged march, scooping up new fans one gig at a time, solely on the strength of their singular vision. A new album almost every year, topped off by an extended tour. Chances are, anyone who has seen them play once – and fallen under their spell – will be back for more. In 2025, the list of cities and countries they’ve toured is mindboggling: Ghent, Turin, Barcelona, Bucharest, Chemnitz, Berlin, Dublin, Bristol, Istanbul, and dozens more. All this from an acoustic piano trio whose music is generally filed under jazz.
But therein lies one of the many conundrums. Despite valiant attempts by critics and writers, their music is generally deemed “unclassifiable”. Check the literature, the term crops up time and time again, along with a host of others: avant-garde, minimalist, ambient, experimental, post-rock. Call it what you will, I’m sure The Necks aren’t losing any sleep over it.
The Necks kick off 2026 with a tour of Australia’s east coast, throughout January-February, on the back of new album Disquiet. By my count, it is their nineteenth studio album, to which we can add a swag of live albums. But, even amongst that profusion, what stands out about Disquiet is the sheer tonnage of music they’ve seen fit to record, more than three-hours-worth spread across three-CDs, far out-weighing previous long-form studio efforts like Silent Night (1996) or Travel (2023). Are they getting loquacious in old-age?
Unlike previous album Bleed – an abstract, spine-chilling sound-collage – Disquiet is positively user-friendly, making it the perfect entry-point for newcomers. Its four extended tracks adhere strictly to their modus operandi, striving for unique sonic states, meticulously crafted from ever-shifting clusters of sound. Each exists as an independent entity, an in-the-moment occurrence untethered to any fixed schema or grand plan.
Opener ‘Rapid Eye Movement’ – if we can even consider a 57-minute tour de force an opener – is perhaps the most Necks-like piece on the album, the one that most equates to a Necks’ performance, except that – as is their want – they’ve put it through a studio blender, multi-tracking Abrahams’ piano, electric keys and organ, and adding electronic overlays, The piece is fashioned from the simplest of piano figures, repeated over and over, a mix of silence and sonar-like reverb that manifests a runnel of sustained, isolated beauty. These repeated shapes are ever-so-gradually augmented by creeping organ, grinding bass, a wash of cymbals, irregular drum beats, kindling a slow-burn effect, saturated with subliminal intensity. The piece seems to evolve via stasis and momentum, even as it clings to an underlying, embryonic design, created on the fly.
And that, on the surface, is pretty much it, give or take. An hour goes by in a flash: ethereal, dreamy, weirdly hypnotic. In a manner of speaking, it’s the aural equivalent of watching paint dry. But, then again, it’s nothing like that at all. It’s as if they somehow stretch and bend time. The repetitive motifs demand we scratch a little deeper, divine something of the delicate weave, the subterranean textures; it’s all there, lurking in the trio’s micro-fixation on sound at a sub-atomic level. By focusing upon the granular, they repeatedly uncover rich seams of beauty (check out Abrahams’ piano around forty-minutes in) as they investigate and delineate the contours of this sonic underworld.
If Abrahams’ piano chiefly presides on ‘Rapid Eye Movement’, then it’s drummer Tony Buck who takes the reins on ‘Ghost Net’. He rockets out of the gate, from the get-go, laying down crunchy percussive patterns, ragged and misshapen. His multi-tracked guitar generates compelling shapes, fueled by writhing organ, thudding bass. Compared to much of their work, this is The Necks on speed, as close to prog rock as the trio has ever come. There’s a heaving savagery at heart, pulse-driven and mesmeric, with Abrahams’ organ and electric piano generating swirling masses of colour, as he meshes in tightly with Bucks’ drums. Midway, Abrahams changes tack, his electric piano finding its way into a bluesy patch, which he quarries for all its worth, part-psychedelic, part-trance.
‘Ghost Net’ begs the question: exactly how does an improvisation like this, which starts off in a haze of polyrhythms, and which eventually, almost imperceptibly, winds down like a clock, manage to sustain our interest – and believe me, it does – over its seventy-four-minute run-time? The answer goes to the heart of The Necks’ puzzling artistry.
It would be easy to label the final two pieces as codas, or afterthoughts to the main event. But that’s clearly not the case. The 26-minute ‘Causeway’ is constructed around Bucks’ guitar, rhythmic and ghostly, amplified by probing organ that cements a passage for Abrahams’ wonderous piano, which stalks across this landscape like a thing of beauty. Ten-minutes in, Bucks’ frenetic drums unexpectedly kick in, underpinned by Swanton’s knotty bass, generating a squall that serves only to heighten and intensify Abrahams’ ornate, exquisite notes before, ultimately, they too are engulfed by churning organ and buffeting percussion, as ‘Causeway’ steers a languid path toward silence.
The half-hour ‘Warm Running Sunlight’ represents The Necks at their most minimal, fashioned as it is from delicate, tumbling notes, resounding bass, shimmering cymbals. Abraham’s piano is gentle as a cascading stream. For all that, it is correspondingly pervaded by a dark, menacing quality – engineered by Swanton’s arco playing, alongside barely registered field recordings, the sound of voices, crickets – that conceals an inner urgency.
When I question Lloyd Swanton about these sessions, whether the trio had any sort of game-plan before entering the studio, he responds: “We don’t pre-plan much at all. Each of us may well do our own thinking in the weeks and months leading up to the recording, but then we just raise what we’ve been thinking as the session progresses.”
As to why The Necks elected to release so much music as once: “Although we never have trouble finding a direction in the studio, these sessions were particularly fruitful. We developed four distinct strong ideas as we progressed, and decided they all deserved to be separate pieces. So, once we had the finished pieces, the discussion was about whether to drip feed them out as three separate albums, or as a double and a single disc, or as a triple disc – something we’d never done before. I must admit I was gunning for the latter, and the others came round to my way of thinking. We just saw the positives in delivering a big lump of music; and the other decider was that the four pieces on Disquiet really complement each other well, and deserved to be heard round the same point in time, rather than being stretched across several years. I feel as a triple-CD, it will really stand out in our catalogue as time passes.”
Swanton’s final comment strikes me as apposite. In a recording career chockful of highlights, Disquiet is destined to be recognised as a towering achievement, a gargantuan slice of music whose maze-like quality lures the listener in, never abating or letting up. Over three hours, the push pull between hypnotic, lyrical beauty and brooding, dark intensity rarely falters or subsides. Exactly how The Necks manage this, time and again – the mechanics, the particulars, the nuts and bolts – feels like an eternal mystery. There are no maps, and few precedents, for where this music goes.
The Necks tour dates can be found at: https://shop.thenecks.com/tour-dates
The Necks 2026 Australian Tour Itinerary
January 2026
Thu 29th – Melbourne Recital Centre, Melbourne VIC
Fri 30th – Brisbane Powerhouse, Brisbane QLD
Sat 31st – Byron Theatre, Byron Bay NSW
February 2026
Sun 1st – Bellingen Memorial Hall, Bellingen,
Sat 7th – The Street Theatre, Canberra ACT
Sun 8th – Four Winds – Windsong Pavillion, Barragga Bay NSW
Sat 14th – Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle, NSW
Sun 22nd – Avoca Beach Theatre, Avoca NSW
Thu 26th – City Recital Hall, Sydney NSW
Fri 27th – Wollongong Town Hall, Wollongong NSW
March 2026
Fri 6th – WOMADELAIDE, Adelaide, SA