Heavy Rocks (2022)

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The exciting thing about a new Boris record is anticipating what the band will do before you press play. Even now, some three decades into their career, the Tokyo-based noise merchants are relentless in their dedication to reshaping expectations of what heavy music can sound like. Sure, this may be the third album they've released with the title Heavy Rocks, and sure, each of them have found Boris working within a broadly defined idea of "hard-hitting rock'n'roll," but Boris is nothing if not a band of genre-agnostics. Just like the improvised drone pieces of the Solomon trilogy showed how heavy ambient music could be, and Noise was kind of shoegaze but also doomy psychedelia (though not super-noisy!), and the COVID-era NO (hardcore!) and W (glitchy dream-metal!) seemed to have nothing to do with each other but were still perfectly complementary, this latest edition of Heavy Rocks defies expectations at every turn. To be sure, it is definitely heavy, and it definitely rocks, and Boris makes it clear from the opening track—the abrasive and explosive "She is burning"—that this will definitely not be a drone/ambient/shoegaze affair. Throughout the forty-minutes-plus running time, the band darts in and out of fusions of heaviness and rockiness, and while only a few cuts "rock" in what could be called a traditional manner (namely the swinging, red-line-fever swagger of "Cramper" and "Ruins"), everything here is relentlessly heavy. Whether the thrashy attack of "Ghostly imagination" and "My name is blank," or the appropriately dour and terrifying "Nosferatou," Heavy Rocks (2022) is unabashedly swinging for your skull at all times. The album's approach is summed up literally and philosophically in the final two tracks; the penultimate cut "Chained" echoes the bristling drive of "She is burning," with a dizzying three-minutes of blasting catharsis. It's followed up, however, with the palate-cleansing comedown of the last song—called, of course, "(not) Last song"—which starts with a somber, spare piano figure that's soon accompanied only by wailing, mournful vocals, making for something that doesn't rock, but is heavy, and may (or may not!) point the way to what is in store from Boris next. © Jason Ferguson/Qobuz