The last two albums by the Georgia crooner Teddy Swims were titled “I’ve Tried Everything But Therapy.” However, he told the crowd at the Stage at Suffolk Downs’ 2025 season-opening show on Friday, he’s taken a different tack since becoming a long-brewing overnight sensation and gone in for some sessions.
He declared, “10/10, would recommend,” during a between-songs monologue that touched on his healing journey and his impending fatherhood. He also took time out to note how his audience — which has grown substantially since the 2023 release of his breakthrough single, “Lose Control,” and even since he headlined Mix 104.1’s Deck the Hall Ball in December — “saved my life in more ways than I’ll ever be able to express.”
Swims cut his teeth in rock and soul bands during his youth, and in 2019 he began posting covers to YouTube that showed off his wide-ranging tastes — country, soul, Billie Eilish’s bedroom pop. A label snapped him up shortly after that, but it wasn’t until “Lose Control” came out nearly two years ago that he made his pop breakthrough. A smoldering showcase for Swims’s raspy bellow that puts a toxic love affair under the microscope, it quickly gained momentum, making Swims one of the artists (Benson Boone, Chappell Roan, et cetera) whose freshness shook up the big-ticket pop landscape around this time last year.
While it reached No. 1 on the Hot 100 for only a single week, its longevity helped it become 2024’s top-charting single in the US, and last week it broke the record for time spent on America’s premier song-consumption chart when it notched week No. 92.
The success of “Lose Control,” which appeared on the first half of the “Therapy” diptych, has slightly overshadowed the strength of Swims’s catalog. Part two of “Therapy,” which came out in January, places his yawp right at its center in appealing ways; on Friday he opened with its opening track, the storming hybrid of Southern and modern rock “Not Your Man,” then followed it up with the swaggering yet heartbroken “Hammer to the Heart.”
Backed by a top-notch band whose musical prowess earned each member a solo, Swims tore through much of his recent catalog, letting the genre-spanning catharsis offered by songs like the shimmering ‘00s country throwback “Guilty” and the tormented “Bad Dreams” flow over and through the crowd.
Friday night’s show didn’t feel as much like a victory lap as it did a gratitude tour. Swims’s sweet between-song banter gave the impression that he was still in awe of his recent fortunes; he promised selfies and autographs to those audience members closest to the stage, and he dedicated “All That Really Matters,” his 2022 collab with the EDM DJ Illennium, to the assembled.
“Lose Control” closed out his main set, and as pyrotechnics went off and the crowd howled along with its battle-cry chorus, Swims took it all in before leading them in it one last time.
TEDDY SWIMS
With Diamond Café
At the Stage at Suffolk Downs, Friday
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