On their most compelling album in more than a decade, the discursive metal trio folds their broad musical interests into a relentless series of hardcore oddities.
The first quarter-century of recordings by the Japanese trio Boris plays like a guide to heavy music’s assorted possibilities. Since the mid-’90s, they have pivoted from curdled psych-rock to blown-out doom, from snarling thrash to blissful shoegaze, from chaotic improv to manicured pop, scurrying like a cornered animal looking for a spring from a waiting stylistic trap. Can you imagine any other band recording with Merzbow and the Cult’s Ian Astbury? That remarkable versatility has made Boris a lodestar for collapsing subgenre walls, within metal and beyond—if Boris were having so much fun digging through and temporarily donning metal’s various garbs, especially on stage, shouldn’t you?
But Boris’ albums have often suffered from that discursive zeal, as the band methodically moved among their obsessions in a way that could feel academic or clinical. They’d build momentum just to squander it, put you in trance just to interrupt it. All that whiplash could get tiring—on last year’s tedious LφVE & EVφL, their studio debut for Third Man, even Boris sounded over it. Not now, however: The remarkable NO—self-recorded during quarantine starting in late March and self-released in a digital rush—is a gloriously claustrophobic crucible full of all the sounds Boris make best, heated by indignation with our time of closed borders and extreme international turmoil.
Boris squeeze almost everything they’ve ever done and loved into these breathless 40 minutes—hardcore tirades and harsh-noise onslaughts, doom-metal riffs and droning tones, rock’n’roll hooks and reverb-shrouded murmurs. NO may be the most compelling and singular album they’ve made since their stateside 2005 breakthrough, Pink. But it’s a complete inversion of those thrashing party jams and hazy anthems—this is Boris, mad as fuck, screaming at the world about the feeling. It is fun and, as they correctly note in an accompanying essay, “extreme healing music.”
NO is rooted in the explosive power of punk-metal crossover. Put it on in the background as you go about your day, and you’ll mostly notice the wonderful belligerence of these short, riotous tunes. “Anti-Gone” feels like Motörhead imploring the crowd to cut loose. “Kikinoue” manages to lumber like doom and lunge like hardcore, like the best of Cloud Rat or even Integrity. They barrel through a relentless, noise-spiked cover of “Fundamental Error,” by cantankerous Japanese hardcore band Gudon. Katsumi Sugahara, who’s played in several such groups since the mid-’80s, adds splenetic guitar to this euphoric tantrum, a testament to the domestic inspiration.
The most remarkable thing about NO, though, is what’s often hidden in its recesses, whether buried beneath the songs’ pummeling beats and hoarse screams or wedged between the tracks like musical bookends. “Non Blood Lore” might scan like a simple D-beat sortie, but it sports a hook ready for classic-rock radio. “HxCxHxC -Parforation Line-” lets hardcore and shoegaze dissolve into one another until they form a chimera. It’s one of Boris’ most ingenious moves ever, a perfect fusion of their preferred extremes.
These songs often fade out of or into some seemingly unrelated motif, like the Sabbath-sized chords that end “Loveless” or the writhing circuitry that starts “Lust.” The album mirrors that structure, too. Boris begin with the instrumental doom march “Genesis,” the riff circling the rhythm like aircraft surveying a target, and end with “Interlude,” a ghostly ballad so vaporous it conjures cirrus clouds. They’re all reminders of how much experience Boris funnel into NO, how many ideas are at play within songs that may seem simple.
White-hot rage and long-simmering frustration bind all these sounds together. You don’t need a translated lyrics sheet to sense that—the music is visceral, the feelings palpable. The words, howled and grunted, consider the loss of love as an extinction event and position music as an outlet for anxiety. Punk is a historically reliable outlet for such invective, of course, a cross-cultural language of discontent whose urgency can’t be mistaken. But in returning to that atavistic expression for NO, Boris didn’t cordon off these songs from the rest of their musical lives. The resulting sense of chaos redoubles Boris’ wrath and gives it a welcome depth, the sense that it’s here to stay because it’s been here all along.
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