Yes. They are indeed back. The wait is over. And, in some respects, it all happened quite quickly in the end.
First came the calling card, cryptic VHS tapes, featuring strobing static imagery and a woozy snippet of a track we now know as Deep Time, mailed to a select few individuals in the first week of April. A week later, vivid saturated posters began appearing in cities around the world. Reddit threads and music publications quickly got the message, and rumours of their return soon became fact following the announcement from Warp Records and the release of new music. After more than a decade away, Boards of Canada’s typically mysterious modus operandi remains as intriguing as ever.
The notoriously reclusive Scottish siblings’ first new album in 13 years opens with the nostalgic arpeggiated synth notes, and familiar idiosyncratic track title, of Introit. For the first 30 seconds, Inferno initially places us in comfortable, very familiar terrain. Pleasingly, though, this introductory refrain vanishes almost as soon as it appeared, giving way to the first “proper” track. Prophecy at 1420 MHz feels subtly unlike much else Boards of Canada have previously released, it’s a menacing, foreboding and genuinely unnerving composition that is also massive and spacious in scope. A sinister hard-hitter, it acts as a nightmarish counterpart to the retro dreamlike palette so often employed by the duo.
While their earlier work frequently evoked a post-hippie idyll, a warped psychedelic patchwork of pastoral textures and hazy, spaced-out blissful melodies, it becomes apparent throughout much of Inferno that the collective dream, if there ever was one, has gone some way south. In case we didn’t already know.
Inferno is also Boards of Canada’s first album to arrive fully within the now truly dominant age of social media, in a sort of post-postmodern world where aesthetics and nostalgia are king, and where once-obsolete technology and retro fashion are endlessly fetishised, remodelled, remade and re-presented. All of this, of course, is Boards of Canada’s bread and butter. When the group first emerged in the mid-90s, their hauntological sound alongside that of like-minded peers and followers, Broadcast, The Ghost Box label, The Caretaker et al, felt genuinely novel and perfectly mysterious.
Their penchant for depicting imagined lost futures quickly became one of their defining traits, and so Inferno now arrives in a hyper-digital, high-speed future that nobody would have wanted to imagine. A far cry from the Eden-like idylls of utopian dreams now long lost to time. The horrors and bizarreness of the world in 2026 constantly bubble beneath the surface of Inferno and, usually through the duo’s extensive use of vocal snippets, degraded samples and cut-up speech, frequently pierce Inferno’s hazy exterior.
Pensive, tense tracks are often separated by transportive interludes, melancholic, playful and frequently very beautiful, creating what feels like an intensely filmic, widescreen vision. “Scenes” gradually crossfade and transition into one another, and the album is intended to be heard front-to-back in its entirety. A continuous stream of hallucinatory flashbacks where the ghosts of the real merge with the fictive in absolute harmony. The best of the shorter ambient-leaning tracks include the woozy ethereality of Memory Death, Deep Time and Age of Capricorn. The album is arguably their most cohesive and fully realised endeavour since 2002’s acclaimed Geogaddi. While it does occasionally draw from the more pastoral folktronica of The Campfire Headphase and the esoteric atmospheres of Tomorrow’s Harvest, those moments feel very much part of a broader and more eclectic whole. Their go-to palette now feels richer, stranger and more playful than before.
The duo’s adventurous approach to rhythmic precision and melodic manipulation, melodies bent, chopped and screwed into uncanny new forms, remains entirely intact, and is at its best on standouts such as The Word Becomes Flesh, Arena Americanada and All Reason Departs. The project as a whole feels painstakingly refined, something shaped and perfected over a long period of time, resulting in an immersive and deeply intensive listen. Saying that, there is also a sense that the duo are genuinely having fun here. The extensive vocal cut-up dominating Father and Son gradually transforms from playful collage into something increasingly uneasy and disturbing as it unfolds.
Religious imagery repeatedly surfaces throughout Inferno, usually through blurred spoken-word fragments buried deep in the mix, portions only just intelligible. Ultimately, the album appears to depict a world, fictive or otherwise, that has lost belief in organised systems of faith, politics and indeed reality itself. Inferno is an intriguing coded puzzle. A private, mythic transmission beamed into an increasingly confounding world. Yet for all its unease and disorientation, there remains the lingering possibility that light, beauty and love might still glint faintly through the widening cracks.
