{"id":413969,"date":"2026-01-16T21:41:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-16T21:41:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/413969\/"},"modified":"2026-01-16T21:41:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-16T21:41:09","slug":"david-boring-return-to-a-world-of-horrors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/413969\/","title":{"rendered":"David Boring Return to a World of Horrors"},"content":{"rendered":"

FEATURES<\/a><\/p>\n

David Boring Return to a World of Horrors<\/p>\n

By <\/p>\n

Josh Feola<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00b7
\n January 16, 2026<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A band always keenly attuned to the nihilistic undercurrents of life in Hong Kong, David Boring<\/a> has returned after a seven-year hiatus with their second album and a darker, harder, more machinic sound. Their 2017 debut, Unnatural Objects and Their Humans<\/a>, was a ragged collage of delicate yet crushing post-punk poems driven live by the urgent, confrontational delivery of vocalist Janice Lau. It captures the band\u2019s brash early period, which has morphed as Hong Kong has also fundamentally shifted in recent years, weathering political unrest, a pandemic, and economic pressures that reshaped daily life and the cultural landscape<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Liminal Beings and Their Echoes<\/a>, released by Damnably<\/a> and UN.TOMORROW<\/a>, documents what happens after the intense energy of youth has been spent, metabolized, and lived with uneasy tension. It echoes and expands on some themes present in David Boring\u2019s earlier work\u2014isolation, alienation, trauma, horror\u2014internalizing the recent past and tracing a faint thread of humanistic optimism in moments of unexpected tenderness.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As with Unnatural Objects, nihilism and horror are key touchstones on Liminal Beings. Lau describes the horror genre as being a formative influence on the way the band thinks about texture, mood, and emotional framing\u2014a sensibility that three different filmmakers, though given no brief, organically responded to with horror-coded visuals for the new album, including a low-budget Hong Kong B-horror pastiche<\/a> for the second track, \u201cNancy Nightmare.\u201d The band doesn\u2019t see nihilism as a dead end but a condition to work within, a way of naming the pervasive sense of helplessness without surrendering to it. \u201cOur brand of nihilism is very much describing helplessness, but it also tries to embrace whatever form of beauty is possible,\u201d Lau says. That impulse is tempered by dark humor and knowing, tongue-in-cheek music videos that David Boring synth player\/keyboardist and UN.TOMORROW co-founder Jason Cheung describes as, \u201ca way to get through the nihilism or the sense of helplessness that\u2019s very pervasive in this age, even more so than in the time when we made our first album.\u201d<\/p>\n

Liminal Beings and Their Echoes is also shaped by intensely personal loss. For Lau, the writing process became an internal dialogue after a traumatic period marked by the sudden death of someone close to her, a rupture that seeped into her lyrics. Rather than framing the album as confession or catharsis, she positions it as something broader: Grief, pain, and anxiety surface as shared emotional conditions, folding personal trauma into the album\u2019s wider meditation on nihilism and dislocation. \u201cIt\u2019s not about myself, it\u2019s more a documentation of what being human is like,\u201d Lau says.<\/p>\n

Those shifts in perspective are mirrored by a dramatic change in sound. Where David Boring\u2019s debut was rooted in sweaty, guitar-and-bass-driven post-punk, Liminal Beings leans into a harsher, synth-heavy palette shaped by EBM, industrial noise, and experimental club music. This is territory Lau had long been orbiting, and which Cheung moved closer to after taking up DJing during the pandemic. Practical realities accelerated the transformation: Half the band relocated after the pandemic, and Hong Kong\u2019s mid-sized venues\u2014a crucial ecosystem for groups operating between DIY rooms and large clubs\u2014have all but disappeared.<\/p>\n

On the new album, Lau steps forward as a more central compositional force, her vocals having evolved from an amelodic shout to something more musical and textural, with loopers and octave pedals layered in. The result, as Cheung puts it, is music less concerned with outward catharsis than inward immersion\u2014\u201cdance music for one person\u201d\u2014meant to be absorbed alone, swayed to and felt as a private, interior experience.<\/p>\n

That inward turn is based on an embrace of uneasy dualities that gives Liminal Beings and Their Echoes its name and conceptual spine. \u201cMaybe it\u2019s my reaction to balance things out,\u201d Lau explains, \u201cto inject a harmonized contradiction into something that\u2019s more abrasive and bring it back to a place that\u2019s not necessarily nice and beautiful, but adds some complexity to the texture.\u201d<\/p>\n

This tension surfaces explicitly in the two versions of the song \u201cVisit Me\u201d\u2014one an incongruously vulnerable, acoustic tune where Lau\u2019s vocal delivery is at its sweetest, the other a syncopated motorik pounder that sounds most like David Boring\u2019s earlier punk era. The two versions of the song reflect, Lau says, \u201cthe fact that everyone has an inner, introverted self and then everyone is living as part of society, and sometimes the inner self will become louder than the outside world, sometimes the outside world is louder than the inside world\u2026 Everyone is liminal in a certain way.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Oscillation between opposites reflects a distinctly Hong Kong experience: The rapid flip between dense urban pressure and the restorative pull of nearby mountains, ocean, and hiking trails. \u201cHow you experience the city is completely changed in a very short time span,\u201d Cheung says of traversing the island. \u201cThe sense of healing, the sense of being in touch with earth, with the ocean, feeling yourself again\u2026that desire to connect I think is very Hong Kong, for anyone who lives in a tiny apartment surrounded by crowds all the time,\u201d Lau adds.<\/p>\n

Day-to-day, Cheung and Lau are both solidly situated on the city side of that binary. Lau is an architect, grounding her perspective in real-world systems and social pressures. \u201cMy day job requires a lot of discipline, a lot of structure, and it\u2019s also architecture, so you have a deep insight into the system,\u201d Lau elaborates. \u201cI work within the system. I work for the system. I think that provides a lot of added value to talking about the system in the music.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cheung\u2019s work as an ER doctor offers a complementary lens: \u201cIt brings me very close to society, I see a lot of people, get to try to understand how different people approach their lives or get through the hardship in living in what can be a very, very tense and suffocating society.\u201d Together, these dual vantage points shape an album that hangs deeply humanistic empathy on grinding, metallic bones, lyrics illuminating the inner lives of individuals navigating Hong Kong\u2019s unique machine. Compared to their first album, the sound on Liminal Beings is far more rigid, quantized like a city grid, its hard four-on-the-floor structure corralling the messy, fluid stuff of individual human lives into a coherent form.<\/p>\n

For all its hard surfaces, though, the album\u2019s emotional center is unexpectedly soft. Several songs offer intimate character studies of people shaped, warped, or stalled by a broken system, such as \u201cJenny Rotten,\u201d which continues the band\u2019s practice of hiding surgically precise psychological portraits behind a punny name<\/a>. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to do these character studies of, let\u2019s say, fictional individuals\u2026it\u2019s an exploration of a taboo subject, or an unhealthy thought, but coming from the person\u2019s perspective. It\u2019s a way to give grace and empathy to these usually quite misunderstood and marginalized points of view, without judgment,\u201d explains Lau.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This is the biggest point of departure for the band on their second outing. \u201cOur perspective grew more empathetic towards the subjects that we are trying to explore,\u201d Cheung says. \u201cOn the first album, there was a lot of anger that we needed to express, to address. This album, it may still sound very harsh and angry in a lot of ways, but it\u2019s definitely more empathetic, speaking to the person or to that subject directly.\u201d<\/p>\n

At its rawest, such as on closer \u201cCoda Lamella,\u201d the album suggests that survival itself is a question rather than a mandate. As Lau puts it, \u201cWe\u2019re talking about in order to survive, you need to forego fluctuations. If you want to survive, it\u2019s the price of survival to be flat, to have flattened emotions, experience, state of being\u2026should one just be flat in order to achieve that stable state?\u201d The album doesn\u2019t answer that question, but in tracing a path through nihilism rather than stopping at it, Liminal Beings suggests a more humane way of living with it.<\/p>\n

The album ultimately circles back to community, a touchstone the band invokes to counter the banal horrors of everyday life, reflecting their maturation from adversarial newcomers to community leaders themselves. \u201cWhen we wrote the first album,\u201d Lau recalls, \u201cwe were writing about people we immediately knew, and a lot of the discourse at the time was about youth and Hong Kong corresponding to societal change\u2026 There was more urgency and restlessness and conviction that suited the more inexperienced mind. There was a lot of, \u2018I need to address this right away.\u2019 It\u2019s sobering and touching to see that version of yourself documented. And now [eight years later] you have a very different insight into the same emotions.\u201d<\/p>\n

What emerges on Liminal Beings and Their Echoes is a doubled perspective, filtered through accumulated experience but still attentive to a younger generation living through conditions the band now observes at a slight remove. The music may be colder, more mechanical and the lyrics more world-weary, but the gaze is steadier and, paradoxically, kinder. In that contrast lies the album\u2019s quiet conclusion: a record that sounds more brutal but feels more human, less interested in screaming at the void than in learning how to heal and create meaning within it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FEATURES David Boring Return to a World of Horrors By Josh Feola \u00b7 January 16, 2026 A band…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":413970,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":{"0":"post-413969","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413969\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/413970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}