Rob Swire Says He’s Making A New Pendulum Album

Even though it’s been seven years since Pendulum’s last album, Rob Swire of Knife Party and Pendulum, has announced plans to bring the band back together.

Yesterday (August 10th), Rob Swire took to Twitter to voice his frustration with the current state of electronic music. “I am so fucking bored of EDM and lit drops and Serum patches and fEsTiVaL bAsS. I’m gonna make a new Pendulum album,” Swire wrote. “It’s going to have guitars and vox and dnb and be completely irrelevant, which I’m starting to think might actually be a good thing.”

Although Rob Swire and Pendulum have been playing shows during Ultra Music Festival, it’s been years since Pendulum released Immersion. After leaving Warner Music for their own label Earstorm, Swire said he’s looking forward to the freedom of being able to release what they want and when they want.

Related: Pendulum’s Summer Tour Schedule

This kind of frustration isn’t new for Swire. He’s always been vocal about how quickly festival trap and mainstage drops started to blur together once EDM went fully mainstream, and Pendulum going back to its guitar-and-drum-and-bass roots reads like a deliberate middle finger to that trend. Considering Pendulum built its name fusing rock energy with heavy dnb production long before “genre-bending” was a buzzword, a return to that sound after Immersion makes total sense as the next logical step for the band.

It’s also worth remembering that Pendulum never fully went away, they just went quiet on new music while Swire and bandmate Gareth McGrillen poured most of their creative energy into Knife Party. Fans had been asking for a follow-up to Immersion for years, and having Swire confirm it wasn’t just wishful thinking was a big deal for the drum and bass community specifically.

True to his word, Swire and the band didn’t just talk about it. Pendulum went on to release the Elemental EP in 2021, their first new music in roughly a decade, followed by the Anima EP in 2023 and their full comeback album Inertia in 2024, complete with singles like “Halo,” “Colourfast” and “Cannibal” featuring Wargasm. Looking back, this tweet turned out to be the first real signal that one of drum and bass’s biggest acts was about to make good on years of fan demand, even if it took a little longer than anyone expected.