Boris - W (Japanese Bonus Track) (2022)

Unsurprisingly for any who follow the band, the mighty Boris has stayed busy during COVID. Their new LP W via Sacred Bones is their 24th release since the pandemic began, per Metal Archives. Among their many splits and singles in that time, including a Christmas album that saw Boris cover Wham!’s Last Christmas, the band put out a titanic, sludgy LP, NO, perhaps their heaviest since Pink.

W is not that—Boris is hardly a band that falls prey to inertia. Nor is W intended 100% as a standalone LP. The band has presented it as a companion piece to NO that counterbalances the latter’s sludge-punk fury. On first blush, it’s more Brian Eno than Motörhead, more New Album than Heavy Rocks. Let’s be clear, though: whatever its textures, W is heavy. Heavy as a weighted blanket. Heavy as a foot of snow after a blizzard. Heavy as grief and healing.

Together, NO and W make NOW. The band has aimed to create a “a continuous circle of harshness and healing" with the two records, “one that seems more relevant now than ever and shows the band operating at an apex of their musical career." It’s clear the band has put some thought into this process. This isn’t their first time pairing walls of sound with uptempo immediacy (cf. “Farewell" and the rest of Pink).

There are many traces of the ways W complements NO. The penultimate “You Will Know" is a massive, sludgy track akin to NO opener “Genesis." In this way, W can almost be read as an inverted NO, which wraps with the only song to heavily feature Wata on that record, namely “Interlude." “Beyond Good and Evil" is another liminal piece of W—we’ve got a new haunting video below for it. On the album, unlike in the video, this track ends with an ominous metal breakdown after three minutes of sickly, unsteady guitar and vocals that verge on whispering.