How Giant Swan created a thumping techno soundtrack for Acne Studios’ show

“You’re going robotic,” Robin Stewart of Giant Swan says on Zoom, impersonating his creative partner Harry Wright’s glitchy internet connection. It’s apt: for Acne Studios’ SS24 show, the electronic duo were commissioned by creative director Jonny Johansson to fashion a “chemical, mechanical, upbeat and harder” soundtrack for the house’s industry-inspired collection.

The end product? A brooding pre-show soundtrack leading into a choppy, metallic banger powered by a monomaniacal kick drum, exactingly clipped hi-hats and a full vocal range of deranged, unhinged pitched vocals droning in and out. It’s the acme of Acne: sexy, futuristic, twisted and asymmetric. It also sounded mega on the runway soundsystem. “The space was really hoofing,” Stewart says with a wicked grin, explaining that they could add a sense of dread and detailed subs in new ways.

The mechanical fabrication of it all mirrors the collection’s sense of construction, with its concrete palettes and dirtied denim. “There's the constant sound of building in it, through recordings of building sites, and it slowly gets more degraded as instruments come and go,” Stewart says. “It’s like you’re on something that’s moving, and you kind of build to this point where it just moves on its own.”

If Giant Swan haven’t made your ears ring before, you’ve missed out big time. Cutting their teeth and filing down their grinding, gnashing sound through solo projects, the musicians have become known for their deconstructed, devastatingly loud bangers and wild live sets at everywhere from the Trinity Centre in Bristol to Tresor in Berlin. This year's EP Fantasy Food brought this to boiling point, with its primordial soup of squelchy synths and moaning, groaning vocal garnishes. If regular swans can break an arm, Giant Swan can break your brain.

Eager-eyed, keen-eared fashion fans will clock that their music has featured on the runway before for Raf Simons AW19. This time, though, it was the first bespoke track created specifically for a runway, tweaked right up until the last second during hundreds of pre-show plays.

Used to standing at the controls and ricocheting off the energy of the crowd, though, rather than being sitting ducks and listening, Giant Swan couldn’t deploy their secret weapon. “If we were playing live we would be reading the room a bit more and Wikipedia-ing Kylie Jenner's greatest love songs and then doing a donk remix of one of them," Harry says.

Get to know Giant Swan below, and click through the gallery above for a closer look at the SS24 Acne Studios collection. 

Before the Raf show, had you thought about producing for fashion?

Harry Wright: Not really, but I think it’s quite nice because aesthetically and conceptually, our music is very far away from the fashion world. It's about personal connections with people in a room. It was a track that has been lifted out of context and put in the new one, and we weren't physically there. So it's very much a case of emails being sent.

Was it kind of weird to have it taken out of context?

Harry Wright: I don't think it was weird or negative that it was taken out of context, because what happens when you create, you don't get to choose a context for it all the time, especially with music. It was just very different to see our live show and how we're used to making it for an energetic kind of evening. In the same way that if someone was like, well, I wake up and listen to your music, that would be quite different.

Robin Stewart: I like music energetic and in the evening! But yeah, I certainly thought after the Raf Simons thing it made the tracks we'd written for one context suddenly be canonised for another context. 

“Our music is very far away from the fashion world. It's about personal connections with people in a room” - Harry Wright

So what did you think of the original brief?

Harry Wright: It was interesting as they sent us a lot of works in progress of the clothes and they showed us the mock-up of the walk, and it gave us an idea about how that music was going to physically exist. They also sent us a moodboard of the textures and colours and kind of information that would inform the music. 

Robin Stewart: It reminded me of a studio wall at uni, you know what I mean? Like, all the different reference points and the things that were recurring. There were a lot of concrete colours and they kept referencing construction and industry, not industrial sounds, but industry, the sound of work, and then they were talking about, like, trying to find sensitivity within that. 

I guess this industrial vibe came to you both naturally?

Robin Stewart: We often get tagged with having this kind of onomatopoeic style, that’s metallic and industrial, and it's not necessarily something that we aim to do, but maybe naturally we do move more towards that for whatever reason. And it’s nice to have that reapplied through the lens of another creative vision.

What was it like working separately on the pre-show and runway soundtracks?

Harry Wright: It was quite interesting. Rob created the intro music, when people are coming into the space, and then I created the runway music. It was quite nice as we could sort of be informed by the two separate pieces. It also took our music into a really longform space, you know, based on things that are exterior to the experience of listening to the music; hitting cues and thinking about timing of the walk, which was different to creating dance tracks.

Is that why you went for a slightly slower BPM?

Harry Wright: Yeah, it was a bit slower than what we're used to. I was actually thinking about that with the runway music because it's thinking about a pace that you can walk to. So I wanted it to be slower. Is it fair to kind of also feel a bit more physical that way or, dare I say it sexier? 

Say it!

Harry Wright: I will say it, I will. But yeah, something that is 150 or 160 BPM isn’t much of a natural pace to walk to.

Yeah, it's turning into a jog, I think.

Harry Wright: Yeah, well, I did a lot of research by walking every day until I was 32 years old. It's been a long time coming. But about the first two years were just research and development. 

Robin Stewart: It’s all been leading here since being a nappy-wearing child! But yeah, it’s interesting writing for walking as opposed to right into dancing. Plus the music isn't the focus, it's about the models and the clothes.

The collection was characterised by clothes that looked like they’d been thrown on in a hurry. Did you try to represent that sonically?

Harry Wright: Yeah, the show felt like people were trying to get somewhere and even the clothes seemed quite quick and easy to put on rather than any fragile pieces, so there was a lot of motion. And the music, I think reflected that as well because it had this restlessness to it, a propulsion that is going to go somewhere. It was all about the finale as well; they kept saying they wanted it to end with a moment where people felt compelled to stand up at the end.

Robin Stewart: I think the clothes really did reflect the sound in a lot of ways because they were quite unorthodox but they were also very economical. Like the bag attached to the coat; you don't even need to hold your own bag and the simplicity of a lot of the colours. Everything was very central to the body.

“The clothes really did reflect the sound in a lot of ways because they were quite unorthodox but they were also very economical” - Robin Stewart

How did you keep your tongue-in-cheek humour for something so elevated?

Harry Wright: I didn't want anything too serious. It had to be a bit playful and not too alienating. We knew it would be put on YouTube, as well, and there's an irony within that already; it goes against the impermanence of fashion, something that has to change every six months, so you want to create a piece of music that also shows some sense of narrative. Using the pitched vocals, too, was a nod to the tongue-in-cheek.

Robin Stewart: Also it’s ten minutes, it’s nothing. It’s got to get in the information quick! 

And did you enjoy being in that kind of space?

Harry Wright: I really enjoyed it. It was very surreal, I've never been around that many famous people before. I think mine and my friends' seat numbers drastically brought the average wage in the room down by a few million. Having someone like Rosalía or Kylie Jenner literally forced to listen to every unmixed snare for ten minutes is quite funny.

Robin Stewart: And Kylie was tapping her toes!