BOARDS OF CANADA - Inferno

Who says bands necessarily have to change with every new release? What if, for some, standing still were, paradoxically, the best escape route from the pointless racket of the present day? Well, Boards of Canada, returning thirteen years after “Tomorrow's Harvest”, act like the immovable stone at the bottom of the river, both to mock the current and everything that all too often flows uselessly on the surface, and to avoid being swept away by the adversities of such a mad era. It's a parable mostly associated with the figure of Buddha and with Eastern tales, teaching that true strength actually always lies in imperturbability. And it's a lesson the duo implicitly makes their own.

The arrival of the long-awaited fifth album by the two pioneers of that strange thing called IDM has, metaphors aside, been signalled several times, sometimes in ways as incredible as they were informal, such as on 29 June 2022, the day on which Hexagon Sun's representative, Mark David Garrett, hinted at the release of a new record. That first clue was followed, four years later, starting on 6 April 2026, by developments that were surprising yet also amusingly cryptic: on the official channel of the Scottish duo made up of Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin, fans began receiving strange videocassettes bearing a seven-hexagon logo, surrounded by typical Super8-style shots straight out of Boards of Canada's nostalgic imagery, all packed inside the same tape. It was a move that immediately suggested something was finally happening. Lending further weight to what had at first seemed like mere rumours was the sender of the packages, namely Bleep, Warp's online store, which only on 14 April officially confirmed the matter, instantly reigniting the by-then almost extinguished enthusiasm of fans and beyond. Two days later, Boards of Canada finally posted a video on YouTube titled “Tape 05”, accompanying the first new official piece of music since 2013, followed by the release date of the long-awaited “Inferno”.

Made up of eighteen movements that, on paper at least, do little to shift the familiar Boards of Canada imagery, "Inferno" is a record that implies a sharply focused critique of contemporary society and the tragedy of current events, caught between endless wars and other, equally tragic ones that have only just begun. "Blood In The Labyrinth" contains, not by chance, excerpts from "The Effects Of PCP", the dialogue taken from the 1979 docufilm "Angel Death", directed by John Cosgrove. These are surgical choices that spell out the political stance of an album that seems conceived as the score for a post-apocalyptic film, laced as it is with an unlikely string of religious references, such as the nod to a famous passage from the Gospel of Matthew running through the theme at the heart of "Father And Son", a track built from samples borrowed from an episode of "Man Alive" focused on the Children of God cult, better known to most as The Family International. Across the track's three and a half minutes you can feel an air thick with tension, almost as if a random track from "Music Has The Right To Children" had been projected onto a black canvas, darkened purely to tell the story of a father who arrives in Los Angeles to talk to the son who, from one day to the next, abruptly cut off all contact with him and the outside world to devote himself body and soul to the Children of God.

The grimoire of religious references doesn't end there. "Naraka" takes its name from the realm of suffering in Buddhist, Hindu and Jain traditions: dusty synths and tight rhythms give way, without warning, to a sampled Hare Krishna chant. While staying true to their stylistic signature, the occultism that surfaces here evokes a certain ritual gesture more than mere name-dropping. On "All Reason Departs" a cavernous voice reads from Aleister Crowley's "Magick in Theory and Practice", published in 1929: the declaration that "the great war must be fought" as a prelude to the proclamation of the Aeon of Horus, the new cosmic age Crowley announced in 1904 to replace the Christian era, while dense drum programming closes in around the words, until they fray and are partly lost in the finale.

"Prophecy at 1420 MHz" takes a different approach, sampling a lecture by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the Iranian philosopher and leading exponent of Islamic tradition known for his critique of modern secularism, and transforming it through sound manipulation that stretches its contours without erasing them, with blackened guitars and vocoders emerging from the tangle of frequencies: the title refers to the hydrogen line, the 1420 megahertz frequency used by astronomers to study the structure of the universe and search for extraterrestrial signals.

Sonically, "Inferno" is, in all likelihood, the sharpest-sounding record of their career: more physical than "Tomorrow's Harvest", with an architecture that in some ways recalls "The Campfire Headphase" in its use of guitars, but calibrated on a different scale, almost inverted. The ethereal vapours of downtempo are everywhere, but drawn with a prophetic, maximalist hand. "Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan" seems to come from a different elemental plane: it's the dark counterpart of "Aquarius", built on a thickening drone, percussion that advances by sheer inertia, and distant chords; an electronic music that brushes against rock without belonging to it, as if performed not in an arena but through a ritual. "Blood In The Labyrinth" brings raga influences to the surface: sitar-like arpeggios converse with heavy pulses, in a hauntology that grows ever more tangible. "Into The Magic Land" takes the duo's harmonic hallmarks and foregrounds the physicality of the instrument: the strings resonate through the room, the wood as audible as the note. "Deep Time", already released as "Tape 05" back in April before the official announcement, is the album's quietest moment: strings and woodwinds moving slowly, a construction that leaves empty space and nostalgia still to be lived.

"You Retreat In Time And Space" releases the accumulated tension into cascading melodies and sunlit chords: the record's brightest point. The album closes with "I Saw Through Platonia", with that faint, elegiac electronic psychedelia that has by now become their signature, and a recorded heartbeat that stops just before the track ends.

A few days before release, the White House used "Deep Time" without authorisation in a propaganda video featuring helicopters and border patrols; laid over those images, the song dismantled their pretensions better than any commentary could. The emotional horizon of "Inferno" isn't outrage: it's something closer to the lucid resignation of someone who already knows how it ends.

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01/06/2026