Band:	Boris / Uniform
Album:	Bright New Disease [Collaboration]
Style:	Drone doom metal, Psychedelic stoner metal
Release date:	June 2023

01. You Are The Beginning
02. Weaponized Grief
03. No
04. The Look Is A Flame
05. The Sinners Of Hell
06. Narcotic Shadow
07. A Man From The Earth
08. Endless Death Agony
09. Not Surprised

If there’s one thing that Boris ain’t, it’s uniform; after sitting through a few dozen albums in as many styles, you can go into any release and have no idea whether you’re going to be relaxed or throttled. There are a lot of ways in which Uniform’s industrial rockslide could complement Boris’s catalogue – and they seem to have opted for “all of the above.”

Uniform, in their own right a genre-spanning trio who are often more noise and sensation than conscious direction, possess a degree of extremity relative to Boris that makes this matchup interesting. Perhaps it’s just relative to Boris and not absolutely, as Uniform have long ridden the line between rock and metal in their pursuit of punk-addled industrial filth, and they can be downright accessible when they want to be. But even if Uniform aren’t as totally, suffocatingly deadly as something like Swans or Godflesh, their abrasive energy still results in a swarthier, more anarchic tone than most of Boris’s work. The question, then, is whether the two artists focus on their shared punk DNA, seek a common ground in noisy atmospheres, or lean into a sludgy, doomy metal sound supported by their mutual affinity for menacing abrasion.

The answer to that question is, as I indicated above, “yes.” All of these sides are explored on Bright New Disease. Boris’s collaboration with Endon, the Eros EP, is a reasonable point of comparison, yielding similar levels of machine-driven excess noise bolted into Boris’s high-energy punk, but there are even more facets to this album. Though there are some familiar-sounding tracks on the album, such as “Weaponized Grief” or the slow, crashing, and aptly entitled finisher, “Not Surprised”, both of which could fit comfortably on plenty of albums, other tracks spin the constituent threads into new directions. The runaway solo breaks in “You Are The Beginning” sound downright thrashy and there are times when the chaotic hardcore “No” and angsty sludge “Endless Death Agony” surpass the typical punk of both bands to land somewhere more Slayer-like. On these tracks, the brute force, volume, and presence from the industrial side meet the energy, speed, and recklessness from the punk side, and a strangulated snarl from Mike Berdan sometimes reminiscent of Mille Petrozza caps it all off for a level of thrash-inspired bloodthirst unusual for both artists.

Most of the album, however, coaxes out the ephemerality of each artist: following up “No” is “The Look Is A Flame,” a noisy drone track populated by eerie backing vocals, distorted shouts, and falling percussion amidst a persistent wail of evil feedback. It’s a song that could easily fit into either band’s catalogue, but what follows it, “The Sinners Of Hell,” is a less standard experiment with atmosphere, not so much an active piece of music as a percussion-and-synth mood-setter. This little trilogy caps off with “Narcotic Shadow,” an electronic-based track that has a kind of new wave/synthwave shuffle; while it’s not too far out of the ordinary and calls to mind some of Boris’s electronic sounds on Heavy Rocks III, for example, it’s still unexpectedly fun and catchy for this project.

With riffiness drawn from Uniform, spectrality from Boris, and fuzz from both, Bright New Disease is a fun and multitextured album; it fulfills any expectations that might be conjured on seeing the names of Boris and Uniform sat next to each other and also finds some less predictable common ground for the two trios to goof around on.