David Boring – ‘Liminal Beings and Their Echoes’ album review: Electronic muscle never packs the punch they’re swinging for
Hong Kong post-punk quintet David Boring are back after an extended hiatus, and their artistic motivations are cleared than ever.
The Skinny: After nearly ten years away, David Boring drop Liminal Beings and Their Echoes with Damnably and their own UN.TOMORROW label, offering a record that furthers their thematic obsessions with contemporary nihilism with unwavering sincerity, if yielding partial creative results.
What strikes immediately is David Boring’s new sonic character. Whereas 2017’s Unnatural Objects and Their Humans was hooked to a more guitar-driven angst, guitarist and co-founder Jason Cheung’s recent forays into DJing during the depths of the pandemic have wrestled a martial EBM beat to their abrasive sound, the punk fire beefed up with industrial electronics and a heavy dancefloor bounce.
Such a new venture works some distance. It’s hard not to when you have the commanding vocals of David Boring’s singer, Janice Lau, able to unleash primal howls or cooing whispers around her otherwise ice-cool, nonchalant frontperson style. Well-honed from Cheung’s club detours in the last few years, Liminal Beings and Their Echoes indeed packs a beefier aural dimension, the extra washes of keys and electronic basslines imbuing their post-punk vista with further room to explore, as well as radiating a certain confident arrest.
This only goes so far, however. What can often materialise by the end of a song is a leaden refusal to clamour for anything truly electric. The synths jab and puncture like any number of plodding dark wavers in a very crowded scene, and the electronic teeth Liminal Beings and Their Echoes tries to bare are just a little too blunt and ineffectual to truly mark a bite their lauded live reputation allegedly conjures on stage.
Welcome detours into ‘Visit Me (Cabin Song)’s brittle acoustic or ‘Still / Life’s surrealist scrape gleam some of the album’s highpoints, pleasing flashes where creative U-turns and experimentation seriously pay off, but otherwise, the new industrial arsenal at David Boring’s disposal far too often shoots with the impact of a spud gun for all their aggro, no wave promise.
The Verdict: Back with a cocksure reinvigoration, such a pumped return and intriguing armoury of electronic muscle never launches anywhere near the visceral realm David Boring are clearly gunning for.
Defining Track: ‘Midnight Gospel’
Release Date: January 12th, 2026 | Label: UN.TOMORROW
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