Boris (band)
Based on Wikipedia: Boris (band)
The Band That Refuses to Be Categorized
Here's a challenge: try to describe Boris to someone who's never heard them. You might start with "Japanese rock band," but that barely scratches the surface. Sludge metal? Sometimes. Ambient drone? Absolutely. Pop songs that could soundtrack a Tokyo convenience store? They've done that too. The trio has spent over three decades gleefully ignoring the boundaries that most bands treat as sacred.
When drummer Atsuo was asked about the band's identity, he put it bluntly: "Having some kind of preconceived message or theme is very boring to me. It becomes a crutch. Just say what you want to say."
And say it they have—across more than twenty studio albums, countless collaborations, and a discography so sprawling that even devoted fans discover new corners of it years into their obsession.
Origins: Named After a Melvins Song
Boris formed in Tokyo in 1992, taking their name from a track on the Melvins' album Bullhead. This wasn't just a casual nod to a band they liked—the Melvins' slow, crushing approach to heavy music would become foundational to Boris's early sound. The Melvins had pioneered a style of metal that moved at glacial speeds, stretching riffs into geological formations of sound. Boris heard that and thought: we can go further.
The original lineup featured four members: Atsuo handling lead vocals, Wata on guitar, Takeshi on bass, and Nagata on drums. They released their debut single through their own record label, which they named Fangs Anal Satan—a title that tells you something about their sense of humor and their indifference to commercial considerations.
When Nagata left in 1996, the remaining three reshuffled. Atsuo moved behind the drum kit. Wata expanded her role to include lead guitar and keyboards. Takeshi took on both bass and rhythm guitar, eventually adopting a double-necked instrument that let him switch between the two without pausing. All three began sharing vocal duties.
This three-piece configuration has remained unchanged for nearly thirty years.
The Sixty-Five Minute Opening Statement
Boris's debut album Absolutego, released in 1996, contained exactly one track. It ran for sixty-five minutes.
This wasn't a concept album with movements, or a collection of songs blended together. It was a single, continuous piece of music—oozing, slow-motion drone metal that seemed to exist outside normal time. If you've ever heard the term "doom metal" and wondered what it actually means, imagine the heaviest guitar tone you can conceive, played at one-tenth the speed you'd expect, sustained until it stops being music and becomes environment.
The album drew obvious comparisons to the Melvins, but it also connected Boris to a broader tradition of experimental music. Drone, as a genre, removes most of what we typically think of as musical content—melody, rhythm, lyrics—and focuses instead on pure sound. The listener's attention shifts from following a song to inhabiting a sonic space. It's closer to meditation than entertainment, and it demands patience that most listeners aren't willing to give.
This was Boris announcing what they weren't going to be: a band that played by anyone else's rules.
The American Discovery
In Japan, Boris remained a cult concern, releasing music on independent labels like Inoxia Records to modest audiences. The domestic market for experimental metal wasn't large, and the band showed little interest in compromising to reach a wider audience.
Their breakthrough came from an unexpected direction. Southern Lord Records, an American label specializing in doom metal and drone, began reissuing Boris's early albums for the North American market. American listeners, already primed by bands like Sunn O))) and Earth, were ready for what Boris offered.
The surge of popularity that followed was substantial enough that Boris became better known in the United States than in their home country—a peculiar situation for a band singing largely in Japanese, rooted in Tokyo's underground scene.
Pink: The Album That Changed Everything
In 2005, Boris released Pink, and suddenly the music press couldn't stop talking about them.
The album wasn't a radical departure from their previous work—Boris had always incorporated multiple styles—but it presented those styles in a way that felt accessible without sacrificing intensity. There were crushing metal riffs alongside dreamy shoegaze passages. Songs that could have been punk anthems dissolved into psychedelic noise. The production was cleaner than their earlier records, letting the songs breathe.
When Southern Lord released Pink in the United States in 2006, the response was immediate. Blender magazine named it one of the year's best albums. Spin agreed. Canadian magazine Exclaim! readers voted it the top metal album of 2006. Pitchfork Media, the taste-making indie rock publication, placed it in their top ten albums of the year—remarkable for a Japanese metal band that had been operating in relative obscurity for over a decade.
This wasn't Boris selling out or simplifying their approach. It was the right album finding the right audience at the right moment.
The Art of Collaboration
Boris has always understood that working with other artists isn't just networking—it's a way to push themselves into unfamiliar territory. Their collaborations read like a list of the most uncompromising figures in experimental music.
Their first major collaborative album came in 1998, when they recorded Black: Implication Flooding with Keiji Haino. Haino is a figure of almost mythical status in Japanese experimental music—a guitarist, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist who has been exploring the outer limits of sound since the 1970s. Working with him pushed Boris further into abstraction than they'd gone on their own.
They've released seven albums with Merzbow, the stage name of Masami Akita, who has been creating harsh noise music since 1979. Merzbow's work operates at the extreme edge of what can be called music—walls of distortion and feedback that can be physically overwhelming. Combining this approach with Boris's heavy rock created something that was neither pure noise nor conventional metal.
Their collaboration with Sunn O))), the American drone metal duo, felt almost inevitable. Both bands had been exploring similar territory—extremely slow, extremely loud music that prioritized texture over traditional song structures. Together, they created albums that felt like being slowly crushed by beautiful, terrible sound.
Film director Jim Jarmusch, known for his deadpan independent films, featured Boris on the soundtrack to his 2009 movie The Limits of Control. Jarmusch's description of seeing them perform captures something essential about the band:
"What's really remarkable is when they play live they're in the mode, in a way, of jazz musicians, not structurally or musically, but the way they listen to what the others are doing and build on it. Each time they play something it's obviously different, every time."
This improvisational approach—three musicians responding to each other in real time, never playing the same song the same way twice—explains how a band can remain creative across thirty years without repeating themselves.
Why Touring Matters
Boris tours constantly. This might seem unremarkable—most bands tour—but for Boris, the road isn't just promotion. It's philosophy.
Atsuo explained their thinking in an interview:
"That we tour so much and release so many albums, I think it is representative of what we're about. Direct communication is something we've lost in this day and age. It's a shame—interviews are over phone. I think it's important to see people face to face—that's why it's so important to go on tour. It's something very basic to humans that we've lost lately."
In an era when many musicians have retreated into streaming numbers and social media engagement, Boris insists on physical presence. They want to be in the room with their audience, creating something that can't be replicated or recorded.
Their profile rose significantly in 2008 when they opened for Nine Inch Nails on portions of the Lights in the Sky tour. Playing to arena crowds that had never heard of them, Boris earned new fans through sheer force—their live performances are famously loud and intense, the kind of shows that leave your ears ringing for days.
The Sound: A Technical Approach to Heaviness
Understanding Boris requires understanding how they create their sound, because their technical choices are inseparable from their artistic identity.
The band tunes their instruments extremely low. Standard guitar tuning puts the lowest string at E. Boris often tunes down to A-sharp—nearly half an octave lower. This creates a heavier, muddier sound, like the music is physically weighted. For one track called "Loveless," Takeshi used a tuning spanning three full octaves, creating an otherworldly quality that standard tuning couldn't achieve.
Wata uses a device called an E-bow, which most people have never heard of. Unlike a guitar pick, which physically strikes the strings, an E-bow uses a magnetic field to vibrate them continuously. This produces sustained notes that sound almost like a bowed instrument—hence the name. Wata uses it to create feedback and sustain that would be impossible with conventional technique.
Takeshi's double-necked guitar and bass lets him shift roles mid-song. During Boris's longer, more droning pieces, he plays rhythm guitar, layering heavy chords beneath Wata's leads. When the song calls for it, he can immediately switch to bass without breaking the performance. This flexibility is crucial for a three-piece band that wants to sound like an orchestra of distortion.
In the studio, Boris records themselves using their own equipment. They use minimal overdubs, preferring to capture performances as close to live as possible. This approach preserves the improvisational quality that Jarmusch noticed—even their studio albums sound like three people playing together in a room, responding to each other in real time.
Genre as Suggestion
Music critics have used an almost comical number of genre terms to describe Boris: experimental music, experimental rock, noise music, noise rock, experimental metal, avant-garde metal, doom metal, post-metal, drone metal, sludge metal, psychedelic music, psychedelic rock, psychedelic metal, stoner rock. Each label captures something true about certain Boris albums while missing what other albums do.
Their 1998 album Amplifier Worship incorporated jam band influences and psychedelia—a far cry from the pure drone of Absolutego. Flood, from 2000, dove deep into drone territory. Akuma no Uta and Pink experimented with shoegaze (dreamy, effects-heavy rock built on distortion and reverb), stoner rock (bluesy, riff-heavy metal influenced by Black Sabbath), and post-rock (instrumental music that uses rock instrumentation for orchestral purposes).
In 2007, they released Vein in two different versions—one labeled "Hardcore" and another labeled "Noise"—letting listeners choose which Boris they wanted. New Album experimented with electronica and dream pop, the furthest the band had strayed from heavy music. Their 2014 album Noise incorporated elements from grunge, bringing them full circle to the era when they'd formed.
The band explicitly rejects the label "heavy metal," despite constantly being categorized that way. They see metal as one color on their palette, not their fundamental identity.
Twenty-Five Years and a Near Ending
In 2017, marking their twenty-fifth anniversary, Boris considered retiring. They would record one final album, Dear, and call it a career.
But something happened during the making of Dear. The songwriting and recording process went so well, felt so vital, that retirement no longer made sense. The album that was supposed to be their goodbye became a reminder of why they'd been doing this for a quarter century.
They kept going.
When the COVID-19 pandemic forced the world into isolation in 2020, Boris responded by self-releasing two albums: NO, a rock-oriented record, and W, an ambient album. Together, they formed a project called NOW—the band's commentary on existing in an unprecedented moment.
In 2022, they released Heavy Rocks—the third album with that title in their discography—exploring hard rock and traditional heavy metal sounds. The American tour supporting that album saw another lineup shift: Atsuo returned to the frontman role he'd abandoned in the 1990s, handling most lead vocals while Mike Engle performed as guest drummer. It was a return to the band's original configuration, if only temporarily.
That December, Boris released Fade, their third studio album of 2022, focusing on drone metal. It appeared without any advance notice—one day it simply existed. Three albums in a single year, each exploring different territory, released on their own terms.
The Consistent Inconsistency
What makes Boris remarkable isn't any single album or style—it's their refusal to settle into predictability across three decades of work. Most bands find their sound and exploit it. Boris found dozens of sounds and moved between them at will.
Their approach connects to a broader tradition in Japanese culture of aesthetic restlessness, of finding beauty in change rather than permanence. But it also reflects something simpler: three musicians who remain genuinely curious about what music can do, unwilling to repeat themselves when there's still unexplored territory ahead.
They've influenced countless bands in the experimental metal and drone scenes. They've introduced Japanese underground music to international audiences who might never have encountered it otherwise. They've demonstrated that heaviness isn't just about volume or speed—it can come from patience, from density, from the willingness to sustain a single idea until it transforms into something transcendent.
And they're still going. After thirty-plus years, Atsuo, Wata, and Takeshi continue to tour, record, and collaborate. Whatever they release next will sound like Boris—which is to say, it will sound like nothing else, and possibly nothing they've done before.
That unpredictability, that constant reaching toward the new, is the only thing about them that's remained consistent.