Roll Away The Stone – How Swansea Sound Rock and Roll

Roll away the stone – How Swansea Sound Rock and Roll

‘Indiepop supergroup’ Swansea Sound release Pre-Post-Truth, their third album on 13 November 2026 on their own SkepWax label. Simon Robinson interviews the band and examines motivation, authenticity and the art of making independent music in 2026 and why Amelia, Hue, Rob and co are heroic in an ancient Greek tradition.

French philosopher/goalkeeper Albert Camus wrote how Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to push a rock up a mountain for eternity, only to watch it roll back down every time. There was no possibility of completing the task.

There is no possibility of completing the task. That’s the whole point. Sisyphus knows the stone will always roll back down the mountain. But he keeps on pushing it anyway.

Camus’s response to the absurd wasn’t despair. It was revolt: to recognise the absurdity of our condition without allowing that knowledge to prevent us from living. And at the end of The Myth of Sisyphus, he goes further. We must imagine Sisyphus happy in his task.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Sisyphus while listening to Pre-Post-Truth, the new album by Swansea Sound. Not (only) because I’m pretentious. And not because it’s gloomy. It isn’t. The album is full of ridiculously catchy punk and power-pop songs, jokes, arguments, guitars and people who sound as though they’re having a very good time.

The reason Sisyphus came into my mind is that Swansea Sound seem increasingly interested in what you do when you know that what you’re doing probably isn’t going to fix anything.

You keep doing it. You get together with your gang. You make another record. You drive the poetry bus. You phone your friend. You open the merch stall. You pack the van. You play the gig. Then you do it again.

You keep on keeping on.

With one important qualification.

You have to mean it.

Because Pre-Post-Truth isn’t simply an album about sheer bloody-minded persistence. It’s an album about striving for human connection in a world that has developed extraordinarily sophisticated technologies for manufacturing the appearance of authenticity.

That’s what The Band That Brought Back Rock N Roll is about. The group in the song has everything a rock band is supposed to have. Songs. Even if their lyrics are borrowed and the guitarist has learned the iconic riffs and solos from the classic tracks of an earlier era. The band have the leather trousers, borrowed from their dads. They know how to get on stage and strike a pose.

Around them is an entire apparatus whose job is to turn this collection of second-hand signs and gestures into the appearance of meaning. Seasoned music journalists hammer excitedly at their keyboards. Influencers and client journos type into their phones. Everyone agrees that something tremendously important is happening.

Rock’n’roll is back.

Except of course it isn’t. Nothing has come back because nothing new has happened. Something has simply been rehashed. The band are an imitation of an imitation, authenticated by inauthentic people whose livelihoods depend upon authenticating it.

In other words, slop.

Slop can be extremely proficient. It can look right, sound right, hit all the right reference points. The algorithm may love it. Influencers may promote it. Journalists may discover a trend in it. But none of that requires anyone to have meant anything.

You can fake every outward sign of authenticity. What you can’t fake is good faith. You can dress it correctly, reference the right records, say the right things, feed the right images to the algorithm. But either you’re genuinely trying to make something you believe is worth making and putting it in front of another human being, or you’re not.

That’s where Swansea Sound’s DIY ethos still matters. Not because DIY guarantees quality. It plainly doesn’t. Not because independent musicians are morally superior to people signed to major labels. And not because making things yourself allows you to escape late-stage digitised capitalism.

Pre-Post-Truth is far too clear-eyed to believe that any more. As Rob Pursey told me when we talked about the album, “the machine follows you wherever you go”. The freedom Swansea Sound once found in the independent space is still there, but it requires more effort to maintain. When we were younger, Rob says, “you could enjoy freedom in a passive way, whereas now you have to be quite nimble and active to seek it out.”

Take Merch Stall. It’s an almost comically perfect little model of the independent music economy: LPs, CDs, cassettes, stickers, fanzines, T-shirts, hair grips, bike bells. All direct from band to punter, with no middleman.

Well, no middleman you can see. PayPal is still gouging fees from every transaction. “We’re not immune,” the band in the song admit.

Even almost 50 years after Sideburns’ notorious “this is a chord…” message, you can still make your own record, press it onto vinyl and set up a folding table at the back of a pub to sell it directly to somebody who has just watched you play. But the wider economic system has followed you there. You can’t escape the music industry complex.

Making a record is one thing. Getting anybody to hear it is completely different.

The three scenes of The Grease That Oils the Wheels take that problem further. A couple struggling to pay the rent turn to delivery work, an electric bike and Klarna. An indie band spend their recording money on online promotion and get thousands of plays but no longer have the cash to actually make the record. Finally, a former politician turned tech evangelist sits in a Georgian house in London explaining the benefits of AI while conceding that the algorithm comes first.

They’re all in completely different places in the economic hierarchy. But everybody is expendable. Everybody is grease. Everybody helps the wheels turn.

Even Swansea Sound.

That’s the uncomfortable idea running through Pre-Post-Truth. You can’t simply refuse to participate in the system because the system increasingly owns the means through which your refusal has to be expressed.

The point reaches its logical conclusion in Sell Out Everything. A supposedly subversive independent record label is doing mobile A&R, checking TikTok, sticking with X because Threads isn’t much use and accepting Spotify’s miserable payments because at least the label’s bands might get onto playlists. They’re perfectly aware of what they’re participating in. But they need a voice.

At the end of the song comes perhaps the bleakest image on the record. The digital economy is a polluted sea. You can swim in it, but it makes you ill. The water is strangely warm. You see the filth floating past and try to keep your mouth shut. But you’ve got a new release and you need to get the word out.

So you compromise.

That’s different from faking it. Compromise is what happens when you try to do something in good faith in an imperfect world. Fakery is when the appearance of doing it becomes the thing you’re actually selling.

Swansea Sound know they’re compromised. We all are. They use social media. Rob and Amelia Fletcher run Skep Wax Records and have to promote the bands they release through many of the same platforms Swansea Sound excoriate.

And yet they still make records. Actual records. They find bands they believe in, help them make things and put those things into the world.
They mean it.

Rob is slightly suspicious of the word “authenticity” itself. Authenticity can become another commodity, another set of analogue sounds, clothes and gestures that can be learned and sold. What matters to him is the “good faith version of it”. And his touchstone for that is playing live. On stage, he says, you can see when bands are actually trying to make a connection. Not performatively, but in reality.

Another thing the slop machine does extremely efficiently is change us.

Wrong Way Round makes the point in the simplest possible way. Its narrator has locked himself inside a cell, but nobody put him there. He chose the pain. He designed the cell himself. Now he’s a sad doom-scrolling man, a “misery-o-phile”.

The machine doesn’t simply feed us things. It learns what keeps us looking and feeds us more of it. You’re miserable, so you consume things that reinforce your misery, which makes you more miserable, which gives you another reason to keep scrolling. Eventually the loop starts to become you.

You’re the wrong way round.

And what turns him back? Not another platform or a better algorithm. Another person. A little love. A gentle shove.

Human connection interrupts the machine.

When I asked Rob whether that was part of the answer to the alienation running through the record, his response was immediate: “It’s the only hope you’ve got, isn’t it?” If Swansea Sound had a manifesto, he said, “humanity would be very much part of it.” He thinks we’re all increasingly close to a psychological precipice, a void waiting for us if we decide we’d rather have a digital companion than a real one.

On Our Own takes that idea out into the world. The song begins with a building. Once it was a tiny music venue where the band played under white strip lights, through a small PA, on a tiny stage. Then it was demolished and replaced by a glass office block. The musicians grew up and got jobs there. The work was dull but it paid enough.

Now the office is empty too. Everyone is free to work from home and nobody hangs out any more.

From venue. To office. To empty ex-office. It’s a miniature social history, but what has finally disappeared isn’t simply music or work or a building. It’s other people. Relationships. Humanity.

Rob told me he was consciously trying to write about a kind of white-collar working class whose communal life has disappeared remarkably quickly. People once went to an office, had colleagues, had a laugh and had a reason to get up in the morning. Now many are sitting at home alone, spiralling. What has been lost isn’t just a job. It’s camaraderie and purpose.

And that void is dangerous. People want to belong. If real solidarity disappears, someone will offer them a counterfeit version. Rob describes the angry political communities that can replace it in our balaclava-ed times as “a parody of camaraderie”.

That’s why the phone call at the end of On Our Own matters. The narrator sees the dodgy stuff an old friend is posting online and becomes worried. He calls. The friend doesn’t answer. Nothing is solved. Nobody is rescued.

“But at least you know I tried.”

Sometimes the shove in Wrong Way Round works. Sometimes the phone call in On Our Own doesn’t.

You make it anyway.

And then there’s Sentimental. It’s barely there, a tiny song, but perhaps that’s why it’s so haunting. The narrator remembers listening to the radio, dreaming not simply of the past but of the future.

When I asked Rob about it, he described imagining himself listening to Joy Division’s Transmission when he was young and comparing that person with himself listening to it now. He can remember the feeling the record produced then, but he can’t recreate it simply by playing the same record again. To get that feeling now, he needs to hear something else. Something new. Powerful.

That’s the peculiar nostalgia of Sentimental. It isn’t nostalgia for the past. It’s “nostalgia for the potential contained in that moment of the past”.

For the futures you imagined then. Futures which, of course, never happened.

But Rob still encounters new records that produce something like that old feeling. The answer isn’t to keep playing Transmission and wishing you were young again. It’s to remain open to the possibility that something you haven’t heard yet might surprise you.

That’s another argument against the algorithmic world. Algorithms are exceptionally good at using what you’ve liked before to predict what you’ll like next. AI may become the ultimate manifestation of the same principle, constructing apparently new things entirely from things that have already existed.

Rob describes them wonderfully as “tissues of dead things”.

Making something new requires something different: uncertainty. You don’t know if an idea is any good until you’ve finished having it. You don’t know whether anybody will listen. You don’t know whether anybody will buy it. You don’t know whether it will change anything. You don’t know what happens next.

You have to:

“Sing/Songs of tomorrow/Into the dark expanse of/Nobody knows”– as Pack the Van put it on Swansea Sound’s previous album, Twentieth Century. (A paean to nostalgia for lost potential which owes at least as much to frontman Hue Williams’ childhood experiences as Rob’s.)

Perhaps preserving the unknown matters. Because against all this vast digital exploitation, the positive gestures on Pre-Post-Truth are small, unpredictable and human. Somebody phones a friend. Somebody gives another person a little love and a well-timed shove. Somebody takes poetry books to where the people are. People go to gigs. People form bands. People make records together.

Which brings us back to Sisyphus.

Double de-clutch is about Jeff Towns and his Dylan Thomas book bus, a firm favourite at the Laugharne Festival. People weren’t coming into his bookshop to buy poetry, so Jeff put the books on an old bus and took them to the people instead.

And what did people do when they encountered this beautiful mobile analogue repository of poetry? They photographed the books and put the pictures on Instagram.

Of course they did.

Did Jeff stop? No. The ancient gearbox ground on and he kept bringing the books. He loved the poetry. That’s why he was doing it.
Rob calls Double de-clutch the other love song on the record after Wrong Way Round. He admires the sheer chutzpah of Jeff deciding that if people won’t come to Dylan Thomas, he’ll bring Dylan Thomas to them, and then being remarkably relaxed about what happens when he gets there. That’s his rock and his hill.

But the song is not about grim endurance. The journey itself is worthwhile. In it, Jeff likes driving the bus. He likes the books. He likes taking them to people. Jeff has retired now – one option that’s never been open to Sisyphus – but the creative impulse remains the same: Keep the bus moving.

The same impulse drives Skep Wax. Rob and Amelia don’t run a record label because it’s an efficient route to riches. They don’t even take money out of it. They put it back into the next pressing and the next band. Rob talks about the genuine excitement of hearing a new song by a young band and thinking: “I want other people to feel like this.”

You have a little cultural capital. Use it. Put another record into the world. Maybe hardly anybody notices. Maybe, occasionally, it reaches far more people than you expected. You can’t design that moment. If you could, the industry would already have turned it into an algorithm.

And then there are gigs.

On Swansea Sound and Heavenly’s recent American dates, young people who had discovered the music entirely through digital channels came to see the bands in person. For some, it was their first gig.

At one all-ages show in Washington DC, a friend of Rob’s spent the evening eavesdropping on groups of young people meeting one another. His conclusion was that at least four bands had been formed that night.

These were people who liked the same music but had never met because, as Rob puts it, “they’re stuck in their bedrooms”. Then they found themselves in a room together and realised: “There’s us. People like me.”

That’s what a gig can do.

Rob describes bands not as revolutionary organisations but as “meeting points”. They can’t defeat the machine. They can help people discover that another space, and other people like them, exist.

It’s solidarity.

And solidarity is in rather short supply nowadays.

Perhaps that’s what freedom looks like in Pre-Post-Truth. Not somewhere you can go, but something you do. You exercise it imperfectly, absurdly, but in good faith and preferably with other people.

Which brings us back to Camus.

There is something beautifully absurd about the Swansea Sound version of Sisyphus. He’s not naked and straining beneath a blazing Mediterranean sun. He’s probably got a bad back. He’s certainly wearing black jeans and a band T-shirt. He’s got a gig in Coventry tomorrow. And right now he’s standing behind a folding table at the back of a pub trying to persuade you to buy a bike bell.
The stone is going to roll down again. Spotify will still pay bugger all. PayPal will still take its cut. The algorithm will keep turning. The influencers will keep influencing. The slop will keep coming.

So make another record.

A real one.

And enjoy making it. With your friends. Just like Rob and Amelia do with Hue, Bob Collins and Ian Button. And all the other bands on Skep Wax.

That’s the particular hopefulness of Pre-Post-Truth. Not optimism. Not the belief that everything will somehow turn out all right. And certainly not the belief that if enough of us make indie records and drive poetry buses around Wales we’ll eventually defeat the machine.
Something more modest. And perhaps more human.

Agency without illusion. Authenticity without purity.

Make something because you mean it. Find other people to make it with. Put it into the world without knowing what will happen to it. Take pleasure in doing it.

Then do it again.

The stone will always roll back down the mountain.

But perhaps Camus missed something when he imagined Sisyphus up there on the mountain with his rock.

Maybe Sisyphus just needed to join a band.

Keep on keeping on.

All words Simon Robinson for LTW 2026 (C)

Swansea Sound on Bandcamp

Skep Wax Records