Boris with Merzbow - 2R0I2P0

Boris and Masami Akita have been circling each other since the early 2000s, and 2R0I2P0 is their most focused collaboration yet. Released by Relapse in December 2020, it was assembled during a year when the Tokyo trio could not tour, and the record carries that specific airlessness. The title reads as 2020 with RIP threaded through it.

The material is largely rebuilt from Boris' 2019 companion albums LOVE and EVOL, but rebuilt is the operative word. "Away From You" opens in near silence before the guitars arrive like weather. "To The Beach" and "Coma" stretch out into the slow, punishing drift the band has spent thirty years perfecting, and Merzbow's noise sits underneath rather than on top, corroding the low end from inside. The closing cover of the Melvins' "Boris" is the band paying off the debt in their own name, and "Shadow Of Skull" sends the whole thing out into static.

For a band with a catalog this deep and this unpredictable, this ranks among the heaviest and most cohesive things they have put their name to. It is drone, doom, and pure noise treated as one material.

Double LP on Relapse Records.