Boris - The Devil's Songs

Impossible to pin down, Boris are the loose cannon of Japanese rock, blessed with an uncanny ability to shift shape unpredictably without ever ceasing to be themselves: flamboyant, irreverent extremists out of Tokyo, always ready to earn a knowing smile — the same one we reserve for that old, incorrigible prankster friend who has, once again, pulled one over on us.

One could place them alongside drone deities Sunn O))), but that's a forced comparison and ultimately an idea that doesn't reflect the band's history: formed in 1992, they've only been tied to the slower end of rock for one stretch of their long, troubled, multifaceted career.

They started out as a quartet, quickly whittled down to a trio: Atsuo Mizuno on drums, Takeshi Ohtani on guitar and bass, and Wata (Yoko Muzuno) on guitar, the subject of a curious personal cult that likens her to a divine woman. Over time, all the members have taken turns singing, even though few words have actually been spoken across their many albums. When they formed, they chose a name paying homage to a Melvins track — tellingly, a slow, distorted, deafening one. But their early sound can only superficially be reduced to that description, a rough, malevolent take on sludge-metal. The first incarnation of Boris followed the Melvins more in spirit than in sound: a rock outfit fusing punk attitude with metal muscle, delighting in bending music's rules to its own will, never short on theatrical flair amid its constant twists, which over the decades have led them through psych-rock, post-metal, dream-pop, J-pop and much more.

Like the Melvins, Boris are good-natured provocateurs who challenge their own audience's assumptions and reward their patience by pairing an irreverent artistic streak with works of real creative ambition. What's more, despite only modest success at home, they've fed their cult status with a relentless, legendary, tireless live schedule, standing as champions of a rock sensibility few have embodied with such consistency, passion and tenacity.

Tackling the Boris discography is demanding, for several reasons. First, their music has no clearly defined coordinates, appearing unpredictable and often unstable — or, if you try hard to pin the Japanese trio down, consistent only in its ceaseless mutation. The Boris catalogue is also demanding because it's unusually vast: 26 albums between their 1996 debut and 2020, plus numerous collaborations, including no fewer than 8 albums with Japanese extreme-noise hero Merzbow, aka Masami Akita. And then there are split albums, EPs, demos and live records. Consider too that many of these releases are double or triple albums, often limited editions, sometimes sold exclusively at shows. A third challenge: listening to Boris means engaging with Japanese culture, the Japanese language, and certain customs typical of the Japanese world. Finally, much of Boris's music can't really be experienced except at extremely high volume, the only way to fully grasp their art of sound construction, built from amplifiers pushed to the limit, dense harmonic textures and analog tones.

The essential trilogy: from Absolutego to the masterpiece Flood.

Absolutego (1996) is an uncompromising debut, a single monstrous 65-minute track that will rattle your rib cage, your speakers, the walls of your house and — with the right setup and the volume cranked all the way up, naturally — even the hearts of your unsuspecting neighbors. The overwhelming roar of slashing guitars is about as total as rock can get, an ocean of decibels to dive into in search of a paradoxical meditation, drowning in a sea of sound. This hymn to the power of noise is an uncompromising manifesto for the band, a thunderous declaration of intent to pursue an aesthetic built around shocking the listener. It's an arrogant, brazen, violent, over-the-top debut, and that's precisely why it stands as one of the most dazzling proofs of rock's vitality, at a time when, in grunge's aftermath, the genre was already being written off as dead.

Their reverence for sheer sonic power takes a step forward with Amplifier Worship (1998), a work split into five long tracks that turns the monolithic extremism of the debut into a full-blown grammar of deafening noise, with hallucination acting as both glue and keystone. On the opening "Huge", it takes a good 5 minutes before the vocals tear through the arrangement, plunging everything into an unbearable despair reminiscent of the pitch-black world of Cathedral. But the best comes later, once the band strays from already-charted territory. The nods to Tibetan liturgy on the quarter-hour colossus "Ganbou-Ki" show just how broad the band's stylistic range really is, equally at home in the long psych-rock jam that hijacks the track.

Above all, a rock'n'roll spirit emerges, filtered though it is through a hallucinated, violently extreme lens, as captured by "Hama", worthy of Fu Manchu, or "Kuruimizu", a lengthy track that starts out frantic and punk before mutating into a gloomy doom-metal exercise and then into aching psych-rock. Closer "Vomitself" runs 17 slow, muddy minutes, a long, eardrum-shattering dirge — the acid-drenched counterpart to the monolithic debut.

Increasingly determined to explore the many facets and possibilities of deafening music, Boris wrote their masterpiece with Flood (2000). Four parts across 70 minutes, a careful, deliberate exercise in tension and release that this time draws mainly on post-rock, post-metal and minimalist dynamics. The approach remains distinctly Boris: extreme, capable of pushing an unprepared listener to their limits while also proving hugely rewarding for those dedicated enough to stay the course. As if vetting listeners at the door, the first 10 minutes consist of a hypnotic repetition of a brief guitar riff, layered irregularly with echoes and reverb, following a doctrine of obsessive minimalism. Tension builds, well fed by apocalyptic percussion hits, more colossal and deafening than ever. By the end, they blanket the entire sonic spectrum with an anguished roar. The vestiges of a more conventional song — an actual rhythm, a faint guitar melody — sink into a placid tension, a poetic ode to catastrophe that remains both distant and inevitable. The gorgeous, fully post-rock guitar textures reveal the band's melancholic side, capable of soaring into aching melodic laments close to the moving guitar digressions of Neil Young. After half an hour, the vocals arrive to inject further humanity into the soundscape, intoning a lullaby just before the flood of decibels hits — an epic, fatal detonation that unfolds in waves, leaving death and destruction in its wake. All that remains, in the piece's final stretch, is a meditation on the foretold end, gazing at the rubble before finally welcoming silence into the heart.

A musical allegory of inner turmoil, a visionary exploration and a moving emotional experience, Flood is a spectacular achievement, one where the ferocity of the debut converges with the expansive drive of the more eclectic second album.

A love of rock: from Heavy Rocks to At Last – Feedbacker.

Unpredictable to the core, just like the legendary Melvins, Boris changed course entirely with Heavy Rocks (2002), an armor-plated stoner-metal album delivered via overflowing distortion, triple-speed boogie and a rowdiness closer to punk than rock'n'roll. There's plenty of fun to be had with bombs like "Korusu", "Dyna-Sour", "Wareruraido", "Rattlesnake" and "1970", all essentially steroid-fueled versions of blues-rock classics, so visceral in their bootleg mutations that they often spill over into the noise of white static, feedback squeals and all-consuming distortion.

The path of muscular, eardrum-shattering, delirious rock'n'roll continues on Akuma No Uta (2003), notable for its curious cover art paying homage to Nick Drake. After a 10-minute intro that seems designed to gradually usher the listener into the band's parallel dimension via psychedelic haze and grim guitar slashes, "Ibitsu" and "Free" are so deafening they make the previous record sound timid by comparison. Everything is flattened at full blast, in a shocking escalation that drives rock'n'roll into a dead end of exhilarating, vitalistic, hyperkinetic noise.

The melancholic "Naki Kyoku (Crying Song)" splits the album in two, offering a guitar showcase in the form of a lysergic jam, before the ultra-rock'n'roll resumes, agitated and eardrum-shattering, culminating in "Akuma No Uta (The Devil's Song)", one of the high points of their career: a heart-attack-inducing start with whirling drums, then a sticky, muddy doom-metal midtempo, and finally an unstoppable acceleration, a frenzied, deranged final slaughter powered by nuclear-grade blues-rock.

Having delivered these two albums focused, each in its own way, on classic rock song forms, Boris once again prove worthy of their reputation as elusive and unpredictable musicians, offering up At Last – Feedbacker (2003), which can be seen as a spiritual sequel to Flood. A single composition split into 5 parts, 44 minutes in all. If it opens deep in drone territory, a psychedelic undercurrent slowly carves out space for itself, alongside a sense of epic scale. The result is a cosmic symphony, diffused into a brooding rock of desolation, as if Calexico had teamed up with Earth. Slowly a whirlpool unfurls, threatening and anguished, seeming to swallow everything, only to retreat before a slo-core lament. It's a theatrical twist that makes the following tormented duel between voice and guitars even more devastating, temporarily resolved in a catastrophic explosion. A hyperkinetic prog-metal passage, close to the most deranged Mars Volta, reignites the confrontation with an unstable, pyrotechnic blend, so much so that what's left afterward is just a river of deafening noise, miasmas of malevolent feedback and radioactive vibrations. A grief-stricken dirge closes it all out, a fitting finale to the most tragic of their works.

Less colossal than Flood, this album revisits the incredible power of Heavy Rocks and Akuma No Uta in a totally different context, one made of pain, suffering, turmoil and death. The cover art, showing a lifeless Wata lying in a pool of blood, perfectly captures the grim intensity of the record, which leaves the listener no escape.

Variations on a theme: drones, a double album meant to be listened to simultaneously, imaginary soundtracks and live archives.

2004 also marks the start of the The Thing Which Solomon Overlooked series, opening with three extended tracks, devoid of drums and vocals, deep in drone territory. "Scene 2" (11 minutes) strings together guitar riff after guitar riff, with the solemn, majestic slowness of Earth but without the deafening volume, while "A Bao A Qu" (8 minutes) is awash in whistling feedback, eventually submerging entirely into a total, rumbling vortex from which it only occasionally emerges. The 20 minutes of "The Dead Angle Which It Continues Showing" belong to the dark, metaphysical drone rituals of Sunn O))).

The second "volume" arrives in 2006, again without drums or vocals, but with the notable exception of "No One Grieve Part 2", which does feature drums and stands out for a dynamism rare within this album "series". "Dual Effusion" (11 minutes) instead brushes up against ambient and psychedelia, starting out from drone, while "Merciless" (14 and a half minutes) sends the guitars swirling in constant tension, raising a terrifying wall of sound. Relief for the eardrums only comes with the brief, closing "An Another After Image".

The third volume, also from 2006, keeps to the same stylistic coordinates, dropping vocals, using drums sparingly and leaning heavily on drone. While "Leviathan" (17 minutes) feels like a rereading of what we heard on Flood, with a fracture at the eight-minute mark that jolts you out of your seat and ushers in a hallucinated, liturgical second half, the shorter "No Ones Grieve Part 1" reverts to a more formulaic drone-metal. They redeem themselves, at least in part, with "Sola Stone" (13 minutes), a slow drone-doom-noise contortion.

The impression is that the The Thing Which Solomon Overlooked triptych, initially aimed at collectors but made slightly more accessible by a 2013 box set with a few extras, offers a minimalist version of the band's music, created by stripping away elements from the sound found on their, so to speak, canonical albums. The experience, geared toward diehard fans and completists, too often tends to highlight a certain monotony and stasis, only partly offset by the Japanese band's ever-fearsome sonic power.

Forever competing with themselves, on Dronevil (2005) Boris take on a project with an unusual format: two discs meant to be listened to at the same time, as was the case with the Flaming Lips' quadruple album Zaireeka. You're slowly drawn into a spectral soundscape, more ambient than rock, before a grief-stricken march gradually takes shape, and then an epic Wata solo serves as the ideal song of despair. The booming doom-metal that follows is rendered dreamlike by its psychedelic undertow, but conceals behind it a bleak landscape, later pushed into the background once the storm has passed. The renewed doom-metal assault then becomes an orgy of feedback and noise, out of which a desperate melody struggles to emerge. Finally, electric power sustains a grief-stricken anthem, a boundless lament that echoes on and on through minutes and minutes of closing feedback, arriving perhaps at the most heartbreaking music they've written in their entire discography.

Heard with the tracks overlapped, Dronevil belongs to the same breed as Feedbacker and Flood, though doubts remain as to whether the thoroughly impractical format of a double album meant to be played simultaneously was anything more than a superfluous, self-inflicted limitation on its accessibility. Heard separately, the two discs are simply incomplete, partial and often tedious, full of long silences and fragmentary arrangements.

Despite the title suggesting the existence of an actual film, Soundtrack From The Film Mabuta No Ura (2005) is in fact a strange concept album inspired by a movie that exists only in the band members' imagination. Written following the grammar of post-rock, it's an album that suggests without revealing, that sketches without ever fully outlining. The listener is thus asked to complete the musical material with their own imagination, perhaps taking a cue from the illustrative artwork found in the album's limited editions. Only on the lengthy "Space Behind Me" does the pull toward drone and noise take over, closing the record out in the most psychotic of scenarios.

Also in 2005, Boris Archive offers up a limited-edition triple live album, with the second disc performed without drums. Over 130 minutes in total, it gives a sense of the band's live experience, but seems aimed mainly at fans.

The return to rock: Pink and Vein.

For a return to a more conventional album format, one has to wait for Pink (2005), on which the Japanese trio blend post-rock, shoegaze, noise-rock and thrilling stoner-metal outbursts, hard-blues and rock'n'roll. Released in various formats, it reaches its peak on the double vinyl edition, 72 minutes in total. The opening "Farewell" is a wall of guitars over which a melancholy melody drifts, as if a cloud of blown amplifiers were accompanying a sad rock confession. Far more rock'n'roll are the tracks that follow, "Pink", "Woman On The Screen", "Electric" and the devastating "Pseudo Bread", in the deafening, convulsive style of Akuma No Uta.

The cosmic guitar fantasia of "Blackout", a hallucinated, eardrum-shattering doom-noise-metal track, serves as a reminder, for anyone who'd forgotten, of one of the many souls that coexist, alive and creative, within the band. Closing things out is the lengthy "Just Abandoned Myself", an orgy of triple-speed ultra-rock'n'roll that after seven minutes unwinds into a hard-blues adorned with feedback, before overflowing into a droning harsh-noise with psychedelic touches: 18 minutes of exhilarating sonic intensity to lose yourself in, closing out an album that could ideally be seen as a continuation of their "devil's songs", without the element of surprise but with plenty of energy still to spare.

Pink marks the turning point for Boris toward a cult status that by now spans the entire alternative rock landscape. Its US reissue confirms the growing, newfound interest in the Japanese band's music.

Ever the eccentrics, for the follow-up Vein (2006) they offer two albums in one: a "hardcore" version and a "noise" version; the first revolves around crust-punk, hardcore and the inevitable drone, while the second is decidedly noisier; the first version features Atsuo's screamed vocals, the second is entirely instrumental. Needless to say, the two versions seem to have almost nothing in common, unless you know what and how to look at them. What's more, in order to follow through on a highly elaborate aesthetic concept, the label had to repeatedly postpone the release, wasting time on failed attempts and turning the work into a costly, much-coveted reward for fans.

Coming back to the purely musical side of things, we find untitled tracks, numerous and short on the "hardcore" version and only two, but very long, on the "noise" one. Despite the chosen label, even the "hardcore" version is thick with doom-laden slowdowns and doses of pure noise, but it retains some punk and rock spirit within its eardrum-shattering madness, with a closing track of a full ten minutes that recalls the psychedelic explorations of Boredoms and Acid Mothers Temple, reread through their own aesthetic. The "noise" version, on the other hand, is a tour de force for the ears, a dense, blinding wall of sound that takes rock music and subjects it to unspeakable torture, returning a lacerated, harrowing version of it, of paroxysmal intensity, recalling the extremism of Merzbow.

Not just Merzbow: the collaborations.

Speaking of the latter, let's take the opportunity to shed some light on the many collaborations between Boris and other artists. The starting point is Black: Implication Flooding (1998), a collaboration with Japanese experimental artist Keiji Haino that puts the listener's sanity to the test through extended, tormented, noisy compositions recorded live. The main collaboration, though - the one that would mark the band's history - is with Masami "Merzbow" Akita, beginning with Megatone (2002), split into three very long compositions: "It Continues Waiting For A Headronefish" (23 minutes) is an unsettling noise-drone fog that the listener must complete with their own mental imagery; the tenser "Encounter With The Inside Of The Wavemotion Of Great Water Fuzz" (almost 21 minutes) surges into psych-rock spasms and noisy gusts, closing in a devastating storm surge; "...And Texas Spaceship" (18 minutes) starts from mournful drone-doom to distill a cosmic pulse that leads to a harrowing galactic journey, a Lovecraftian version of Pink Floyd's "Interstellar Overdrive" by Pink Floyd.

If Megatone attempts to merge the experimental souls of its creators, 04092001 (2005), a live document from 2001, seems only to add chaos to their album Heavy Rocks (2002), five of whose tracks are reinterpreted here. More structured is Sun Baked Snow Cave (2005), a colossal 62-minute monster that pushes what was heard on Megatone to its extreme consequences: this time the distance covered runs from the faintest, sparsest, most desolate and melancholic of funeral farewells that unfolds in the first part, to the terrifying mix of dark-ambient and drone-noise that follows - a pitch-black, impenetrable nightmare that then slides into a coda sounding like a solemn requiem and, in the end, even a soothing one.

This album has that transcendental, meditative quality found in Boris's best work and in Merzbow's most inspired moments, an evocative imaginative streak and an admirable ability to build tension and unfold a musical narrative. It remains a proposition for those with a taste for extremity and the patience not every listener can claim to have. It's neither the most accessible nor the most original of their works, but it stands worthily alongside other chapters of their discography such as At Last – Feedbacker and Flood.

Inevitably, Boris collaborate with Sunn O))) on Altar (2006), on which they serve as a rock counterweight to the Americans' liturgies. Guitars remain the undisputed masters, not least because there are now a full four of them on the opening "Etna". Far more surprising is "The Sinking Belle", a resigned folk-rock ballad sighed by Jesse Sykes, already active with the Sweet Hereafter, set in a half-light that has nothing to do with either band's usual discography. The respite is entirely temporary, though: the galactic drone of "Akuma No Kuma", with vocoder, trombone, synth and moog, lands not far from where the future Fuck Buttons would end up.

"Fried Eagle Mind" eases the tension into a mournful lullaby soaked in reverb and scarred by the most atrocious noise, while "Blood Swamp" closes things out with the most harrowing of hallucinated stillness, a torment in which guitar howls and wails form an otherworldly choir of the damned. The limited edition of the album also includes "Her Lips Were Wet With Venom", 28 minutes in the company of, among others, Dylan Carlson. It's a boundless, multi-headed monster - meaning guitars - in which the Earth founder plays the role of desert poet, making his instrument resound in a landscape alien to any form of life.

Also in 2006 they collaborate with guitarist Michio Kurihara, highly active in various different bands as well as a solo artist, on Rainbow, an episode considerably more psychedelic than their usual standard. The majestic hallucination of "Rafflesia" sets a softer tone, introducing melody as a counterpoint to the guitar slashes, but it's "Rainbow" that surprises even more: a faint nursery rhyme sung by Wata in a thin voice, made sharper only by the distorted electric guitar. This psych-rock vein occasionally takes on bluesy, Hendrix-esque tones too, as on the molten "Sweet N°1", an exceptional guitar showcase. The two long compositions included on the limited edition released by Inoxia in 2007 deserve a separate mention: these are ambient drone tracks that reach levels of rarefaction bordering on trance.

The collaboration with Michio Kurihara would be repeated on Cloud Chamber (2008), just two extended tracks that don't stray far from what was heard on The Thing Which Solomon Overlooked, leaning once again on their most deafening and, if we may use the word, monotonous side.

2007 also saw the release of another collaboration with Japanese noise artist Merzbow dating back to 2001, the EP Walrus/Groon. It consists of two tracks: the first a bizarre cover of the Beatles' "I Am The Walrus", the second a whirlwind of free noise spinning over tribal percussion. After the live rarity of the split with the American band Doomriders, titled Long Hair And Tights (2007) and leaning towards stoner-rock, came the split EP with fellow countrymen Stupid Babies Go Mad, called Damaged (2007) and inspired by Black Flag and their lethal hardcore-punk.

It was an extremely prolific period, which also produced another split EP, featuring only Wata alongside Japanese artist Ai Aso on two covers, one of which is King Crimson's "Island". There was also a majestic live document, Rock Dream (2007), documenting a concert together with the usual Merzbow, in which the Japanese band brings together many of the best moments of their career, including 35 minutes devoted to "Feedbacker" and the definitive, orgiastic, chaotic version of "Just Abandoned Myself".

Apparent calm and a new trilogy: from Smile to Attention Please.

With Smile (2008) they return to their main discography, opening with a hallucinogenic cover of "Flower Sun Rain" by fellow countrymen Pyg and moving on to wilder bursts of distorted, deafening rock'n'roll, once again in line with their most digestible and full-throttle work. It's a fresh tribute to the energy of rock, though the finale also pays homage to their more colossal side with a memorable, untitled 15-minute closing epic, featuring a hand from Stephen O'Malley and a pronounced psychedelic streak.

Less elusive than many of their other albums, Smile is an ideal starting point for newcomers who don't feel up to tackling the more challenging chapters of their prolific career. For what it's worth, it's only their second album, after Amplifier Worship, to feature vocals on every track. Confirming its more palatable nature for an audience beyond their usual niche, the album even made an appearance on Billboard's "Top Heatseekers" chart, at #20. Smile -Live at Wolf Creek- (2008) captures the album in a live setting and pairs up with Smile -Live In Prague (2009). For the incurable completists, there's also Boris Variations (2010), a compilation featuring some rarities and new recordings.

What follows is a period of relative calm, interrupted first by a new release with Merzbow, the old 2004 recordings issued as Klatter (2011), and then by yet another extravagance, the trio of New Album, Heavy Rocks II and Attention Please (2011): three formally distinct and deeply different albums, released just eight days apart. The first is a batch of pop-rock tracks in Japanese style, with shoegaze and electronic elements, but also broad openings toward danceable material and a hypertrophic kitsch, made of a spectacle flaunted without shame.

The radio-friendly melancholy of a “Flare”, with its futuristic, dystopian soul worthy of the best Muse, will probably age better than a bubblegum ditty like “Party Boy” or the supersonic restlessness of “Luna”, which is far too crowded in its arrangement and overlong across its eight-plus minutes.

By the time we reach an eighties-style dance number like “Jackson Head”, though, the suspicion that we're dealing with the kind of anthology-worthy eclectics capable of assembling an entire album of styles “other” than their usual canon has become pretty much a certainty. Among the many paths taken, “Looprider” perhaps yields the ripest fruit: the j-pop melody is bent into a kraut-rock rhythmic machine, steeped in a shoegaze syrup that closes with a dreamlike coda.

Heavy Rocks (2011) represents the more orthodox counterpart of the double release, their new contribution to the canon of the most acidic, distorted stoner and rock'n'roll. Not by chance, it shares its title with their 2002 album, reaffirming the Japanese band's ongoing quest for “heaviness”. There's no shortage of detours from the main furrow, though, toward danceable dance-punk (“Jackson Head”), shoegaze (another version of “Tu, La La”), drone-doom turned celestial (the lengthy “Aileron”), and above all the melancholic “Missing Pieces”, 12 and a half minutes of psychedelic lullaby worthy of the most boundless Bardo Pond, exploding into an atomic climax at its center. Attention Please (2011) instead returns to pop-rock, this time tinged with noise and alternative-rock touches, also reprising four tracks already heard on New Album, in alternate versions.

Impossible fusions: the psychedelic, dreamlike and deafening albums.

Their return to the studio comes with Präparat (2013), which can't help but draw on everything that's happened in their recent career. It opens psychedelic and instrumental with “December”, then veers into a dreamy, bewitching drone, sung in a thin thread of voice (“Elegy”), before closing with a rhythmic charge. In keeping with the logic of their own illogic, an episode like “Evil Stack 3” inevitably arrives, a chaotic piece of harsh noise, closing out the opening triptych.

The record goes on alternating psychedelia (“Monologue”, “Castle In The Air”) with more familiar sludge-drone explorations (the Melvins-esque “Method Of Error”; the noxious grunge of “Bataille Sucre”), finding in the dreamy gothic of “Mirano” yet another stylistically uncategorizable composition. Overall Präparat seems to condense the broad spectrum they developed in 2011 across a trio of albums into a much more concise and, essentially, more focused work.

Noise (2014) follows the same model, condensing their multifaceted imagination—doom, sludge, shoegaze and dream-pop all included—into a highly varied tracklist. The misleading title actually conceals one of their most balanced and accessible albums, delightfully danceable and thunderous (“Melody”), infectiously propulsive (“Vanilla”), and achingly melancholic (“Ghost Of Romance”), capable across the 18 minutes of “Angel” of writing a belated, surprising classic that joins atmospheric, dreamlike, psychedelic and explosive elements through near-chamber-music nuances and quasi-symphonic grandeur.

The “devil's song” “Quiksilver” reworks their ultra-rock'n'roll over ten minutes, reining it in with sprawling melodies, progressive inlays and airy, epic arrangements, while still allowing itself that textbook drone-doom coda. The same year also saw the release of Archive II (2014), split between live material and demos.

A new trilogy, material for collectors, and live documents.

2015 brings a new trinity: Urban Dance, Warpath and Asia. The first installment of the triptych also pushes into post-rock territory, while retaining strong noise, drone and experimental elements, putting both the eardrums and the sanity of anyone brave enough to listen through a hard test, but rewarding them with the schizophrenic clash of dreamy and cacophonous on “Surrender” and the spacey, psychedelic doom of “Endless”.

On the other two chapters, by contrast, their most extremist psych-drone-noise spirit dominates, stretched out over extended tracks (Warpath) or even colossal ones (“Terracotta Warrior” on Asia), instrumental and abstract. On “Behind The Owl” all the musical material is reduced to an extreme minimalism made of reverb, and shortly after comes “Dreamy Eyed Panjandrum”, making Warpath an experience fit only for a handful of completists and incurably curious listeners.

The aforementioned “Terracotta Warrior”, across its 21 minutes, transforms a dark-ambient refraction into a solemn funeral mass for distorted guitars, confirming that not even the Japanese band's delirious prolificacy can smother their peculiar creativity—though it does make it all the more daunting to dig out the new gems from the jumble of assorted releases, which easily includes the other tracks on Asia.

Not content with this sheer volume of released music, 2015 is also the year of two collaborations given away at concerts: the cassette/LP EROS (with Endon) and the CD/12" Low End Meeting (with Goth-Trad), true gems for collectors. Crossing Waltz (2016), meanwhile, is another live document.

Gensho (2016) is a new collaboration with Merzbow, a double album split as follows: the first part consists of new recordings of old tracks and a cover of My Bloody Valentine; the second part consists of new compositions credited to Merzbow. The two discs, needless to say, are meant to be listened to simultaneously, as with Dronevil. It's an addition to their body of work made for fans, and appreciable, perhaps, only by them.

The self-celebration of a unique career: from Dear to NOW, up to the thirtieth anniversary.

Dear (2017), their twenty-fifth anniversary album, presents itself as a farewell. As with their spiritual fathers Melvins, after twenty-five years Boris have said everything and its opposite, and the prospect of them wrapping up their career is certainly a depressing one, but also an understandable one: how could you ask them to repeat themselves, when they've made eclecticism within extreme music their banner? And indeed Dear measures out that common rock denominator that nonetheless runs across their aesthetic, offering new compositions built on heaviness and the cathartic power (one track is literally titled "The Power") of decibels, distortion, reverb and echo, starting with the opening "D.O.W.N. (Domination Of Waiting Noise)".

The return to the grammar of drone is enriched by the dreamlike, meditative dimension they've developed over the last decade, as tracks like "Kagero" and "Biotope" clearly show. The emotional peak, though, is the long "Dystopia-Vanishing Point", an overflowing power-ballad dripping with psychedelic traces and deafening excess. So rather than a tombstone of an album, this is more of a self-tribute, one that could only close with a tribute to Melvins in the title track.

The self-celebration continues first with the live album Eternity (2018) and then with LφVE & EVφL (2019), a double album that encapsulates the broad sonic spectrum they've explored across their career. Balancing vivid contrasts has by now become a precise art for them, so much so that within the context of their discography it feels entirely natural to open with the docile "Away From You", practically a fairy-tale whisper, barely there, and then move into the galactic dirge of "Coma", before crashing into the war-dance that opens "EVOL", sixteen and a half minutes capable of stretching into a feverish murmur and then settling into a midtempo dominated by Wata's splendid guitar, before the long post-rock coda. The second half passes through the viscous "LOVE", worthy of Electric Wizard, but closes with "Shadow Of Skull", another treacherous addition to their drone-doom songbook.

NO (2020) captures the difficult period of isolation brought on by the pandemic wave, through direct, explosive tracks full of hardcore-punk and unstoppable energy. In those same months came the moving Refrain, with Z.O.A., a long 33-minute composition that opens gingerly, builds to a heartfelt explosion, and then is left to languish in desolate territory for the whole second half - yet another fresh, evocative rereading of their drone creed.

2R0I2P0 (2020) closes out that difficult year with a new collaboration with Merzbow, a snapshot of their last live event together from late February and yet another occasion, for the completists, to put their eardrums at risk. Among the curiosities is also a cover of Melvins' own "Boris", the very song they took their name from: a way of coming full circle, after so many years and so many releases. This is certainly not the time to talk about the end of their career, though, because once this difficult juncture has passed, Boris will surely go back to writing new, unpredictable "devil's songs".

Their debut on Sacred Bones falls in line with the largely atmospheric catalogue of their new label, while still staying in touch with the rest of their boundless, eclectic and often deafening discography, without fully giving up their taste for fearsome sound. In contrast with the preceding NO (2020), which stunned with devastating volumes and colossal sludge-doom, the nine tracks of W (2022) return to the post-rock territory they've visited time and again over the decades, but here bent more towards dream-pop and shoegaze. The dreamlike sequel to NO, which together with this W not by chance spells out the word "NOW", is thus an adventure meant to be listened to in tandem with the previous album, within a logic of destruction and regeneration, a yin and yang that tells the story of a difficult period for the band, forced to halt their vital live activity, and for humanity as a whole, grappling with the worst pandemic in a century.

What's missing is the tension typical of their classics, and too many tracks wander without ever arriving anywhere, so much so that the most immediate point of comparison is probably their own Soundtrack From The Film Mabuta No Ura (2005).

They return for the thirtieth anniversary with a third chapter in a series titled Heavy Rocks, to be set alongside the 2002 and 2011 instalments and, like those, focused on seventies-style hard'n'heavy sounds reinterpreted through the band's unhinged creativity with stoner-noise energy. Deafening volumes, torrents of energy and a certain postmodern taste that keeps everything suspended between imitation and tribute drive these ten new tracks, which swell their less experimental, more immediate catalogue, without entirely giving up on the odd flash of creativity.

It's the ideal compromise between the band's adrenaline-fuelled power (see "She Is Burning", "My Name Is Blank") and their never-dormant urge to experiment and push boundaries ("Nosferatou", the industrial-thrash-metal of "Ghostly Imagination", the noisy piano-driven singer-songwriter fare of "(Not) Last Song"). It's only a real surprise if you've missed their vast back catalogue, but the intensity of the tracks, their constant ability to play with the listener and dodge expectations, still deserve attention from anyone drawn to sounds this intense.

Boris are still a restless beast, and that last track, cut off halfway through, reasonably suggests it isn't yet time for them to hang up their instruments. Surprisingly, on December 2, 2022, they released Fade directly on Bandcamp: a way of also celebrating their more drone-leaning side with over an hour of galactic distortion. It would only arrive on double vinyl in 2023, to the delight of those who've followed them since the early years, and shortly after came a collaborative work with New York's Uniform, Bright New Disease (2023)

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