Boards of Canada have not released an album since 2013. In the intervening thirteen years they sent a website back online with the message “nobody home” in morse code, mailed unmarked VHS tapes to fans, and said nothing else.
When ‘Father and Son’, their first new music in thirteen years, arrived in April, it featured an Auto-Tuned believer declaring his love for the Lord over a snaking beat, his conversation partner answering in corroded metallic babbles that sounded like Drukqs-era Aphex Twin. Something about the corroded metallic babble made thirteen years feel irrelevant.
Inferno is their darkest record by some distance and their most direct. The fog that has always been part of the BoC sound – the tape hiss, the degraded textures, things half-heard at the edge of the mix – has largely lifted. Drumbeats and basslines slam against the ear, pulling from industrial and jungle in ways their earlier records never did.
On ‘Age of Capricorn’, in the midst of a smeary choral loop, an American-accented voice declares “I’m a sinner. You bore my sin.” On ‘All Reason Departs’, a Crowley excerpt about bloody sacrifice gives way to a dense mechanic groove rolling in like rusted gears catching. On ‘Naraka’, named after the Buddhist realm of suffering, devotees chant the Hare Krishna mantra and it sounds, somehow, like paradise. These are not the sounds of the duo who sampled children’s laughter over downtempo hip-hop beats in 1998.
What hasn’t shifted is their understanding that menace and tenderness belong in the same record. ‘You Retreat in Time and Space’, arriving after 60 minutes of tension, offers the kind of warmth that arrives after you’ve been cold for a long time – soft horns, bells, a beatific stillness.
The album closes on ‘I Saw Through Platonia’, ending on the simple recording of a human heartbeat. It’s the album’s thesis made physical: throughout Inferno, sampled voices make declarations about deities and prophecies, things nobody can verify. The heartbeat is the one thing anyone alive can confirm within their own body. In an age of AI-generated reality and information collapse, that feels like the only honest place to land.
The hi-fi production will divide longtime fans who prize the murk. I think the clarity is the right call – you need to hear what the voices are saying for the album’s case to land. One track, ‘Deep Time’, has an orchestral swell that briefly overshoots its surroundings. At 70 minutes and 18 tracks it will take multiple listens to fully absorb. Neither is a serious objection.
I’ve been waiting for this record since I was a different person. I didn’t expect it to be this dark, or this good, or this clear about what it was trying to say. Thirteen years is a long time, and Inferno was everything it could have been.
