What’s (Re)New?: Two Decades of Pink by Boris and Way Their Crept by Grouper
Boris
Pink
(20th Anniversary Reissue)
Relapse Records
Released: 10/17/25
To whom it may interest,
In 2016, I reviewed the 10-year anniversary edition of Boris’ landmark release, Pink, which served as my introduction to the group and perfect reason to keep up with the band’s varied output for going on twenty years. Released by Sargent House as a triple-LP, one of which was dubbed Forbidden Songs as it housed then-unreleased runoff from the Pink sessions, pressed as pink with purple splatter variants and packaged in a thick-cardboard capacity sleeve. The cover is so thick I’ve been unable to find polypropylene sleeves big enough to house and protect the album.
You can read my review of the 10-year anniversary reissue of Pink over at
I Heart Noise.
Pink was originally released in Japan in 2005 via Diwphalanx Records and issued in 2006 for U.S. audiences thanks to Southern Lord Recordings. Now celebrating 20 years, new deluxe editions of Pink are being released by Relapse Records along with a reissued and expanded version of the band’s dronevil release, also released in 2005.
A live album, Performing "PINK" in Its Entirety - Live at Shindaita Fever 20160924, is included in the 6-LP version of the Pink reissue and was made available on Bandcamp as a digital release.
Here’s a visual taste of the live album:
As of this writing, a lot of the deluxe packages and variants of Pink and dronevil are already sold out at Relapse, but some copies are still available.
Links:
Boris — Official / Bandcamp / Instagram
Relapse Records — Official / Bandcamp
Links, knowledge, and sounds were handed over courtesy of another/side:
Japanese legends Boris are celebrating the 20 Year Anniversary of landmark albums Pink and dronevil with special editions of each release, out next week on Relapse.
The iconic album Pink will be available for the first time in a decade as a 20th Anniversary Reissue featuring the original CD sequence as a 2XLP for the first time ever, with an exclusive D side etching on the vinyl. Additionally, Pink will see a deluxe reissue box set with a limited edition 6XLP collection including 3 LP's worth of unreleased music. The deluxe box set features the original vinyl version of Pink, expanded Forbidden Tracks from the Pink sessions, live material never before released on vinyl and previously unreleased rough mixes.
Boris' classic album dronevil will be available for the first time since its original release; two different albums of soaring ambient space and frenetic headbanging rock n' roll meant to be played at the same time. This new edition is a joint 2XLP mix available for the very first time on vinyl and is titled dronevil - example -.
Grouper
Way Their Crept
kranky
Releases: 11/21/25
Thinking about 2005, I didn’t ignore the “lo-fi” garage nostalgia informing the neo-proto-punk of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the 60s Kinks evocation of The Strokes, or the Detroit Rock City-blues of The White Stripes. I bought those records, too, so I wasn’t immune to their generational effects. I did, though, eventually find myself irritated at how infallible these bands were deemed at the time, seemingly without flaw and consequently handed unanimous praise from every critic’s pen during their respective heydays, especially The White Stripes.
While not absent of grit, the “lo-fi” quality that those high-profile records achieved sounded like it was owed more to a soundboard effect than a crude recording setup, the contrast heavy and obvious as I began to find Shitgaze’y and more abrasive bands like Sic Alps, No Age, OCS (and eventually Osees), and early U.S. Girls, who I would later discover at a small show in Philly in the early 2010s. Albums issued by labels like Siltbreeze, Animal Disguise, and Folding offered an underground alternative to the garage revival, the often enveloping, choppy, and muddy nature of those recordings coming across as perhaps more genuine, maybe even more true to the sounds pursued by Yeah Yeah Yeahs or The Strokes.
As a sonic standard, Chicago’s kranky label held a similar vision, label founders Joel Leoschke and Bruce Adams having a hand in platforming otherworldly post-rock, electronic, and ambient bands and projects like Labradford, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Stars Of The Lid, loscil, Earthen Sea, and Grouper, the project of musician and producer Liz Harris.
While not drawing from the Siltbreeze well per sé, Harris’s 2005 first album, Way Their Crept, which is planned as a reissue later this year, exhibits comparable levels of dense layering and reverberating tone. Melancholic touches and fully-obscured vocals, the listener can only stare while being drawn into this album’s drifting swathes of vibrating tone. As Shitgaze bands often worked in muck-laced, guitar-driven distortion and calloused, cymbal-laden beats, the ambient and ethereal din of a song like “Sang Their Way” or the affecting harmonies in “Adorned” felt evocative enough to me to recall this point in time, when echoes and dissonance were manifest as both combustive and meditative.
Links:
Grouper — Bandcamp / Instagram
kranky — Official / Bandcamp
Links, knowledge, and sounds were handed over courtesy of Rarely Unable:
For the first time in more than 15 years, the debut album by Grouper is being made available on LP and CD, reissued in conjunction with the 20th anniversary of the original release.
The first in a series of ineffable solo albums and collaborations that have come since, these are the initial sounds widely shared by the artist on a long journey of explorations that continue to this day.
Sincerely,
Letters From A Tapehead
