Boards of Canada - Inferno

Thirteen Years Later, The Hexagon Opens Again

Thirteen years is a long time to wait for anything. Thirteen years between records is long enough for the world to change shape entirely, for the cultural moment that produced the last one to feel like something from a different century, which it literally is. Boards of Canada released Tomorrow's Harvest in 2013, and then they did what Boards of Canada do, which is disappear. No announcements, no tours, no social media presence to speak of. Just silence and the occasional rumour, the kind of silence that their discography has always seemed to predict, as though the music itself was always describing the gaps between things.

Now Inferno is here, and the first thing to say about it is that it does not sound like a comeback. It sounds like a continuation. The Scottish duo of Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin have picked up exactly where they left off, in the territory between unease and enchantment, and they have pushed deeper into it. If Tomorrow's Harvest was their cold war record, all barren landscapes and distant sirens, Inferno is their occult record. It is steeped in religion, ritual, and the dark arts, and it uses those themes not as decoration but as architecture. This is an album built like a cathedral, or maybe a temple, or maybe somewhere less comfortable than either.

The record opens with Prophecy at 1420 MHz, which features the voice of Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr describing God as the ultimate resonance. It is a striking starting point, and it sets the tone for what follows. Across the first half of the album, voices keep arriving. A Christian televangelist on Age of Capricorn. A conversation from a 1971 documentary about Jesus on Father and Son. Hare Krishna chanting on Naraka, a track named after the Sanskrit word for Hell. A woman describing embryo development on The Word Becomes Flesh. A garbled quotation from Aleister Crowley on All Reason Departs. These samples are not garnish. They are the thematic spine of the record, and they give Inferno a quality that feels less like a collection of tracks and more like a transmission, something tuned in from a frequency you were not supposed to find.

The question is whether the music underneath all of this justifies the weight of the concept. The answer is mostly yes, and sometimes emphatically yes. Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan is the first real statement of intent, a track built on heavy synths that layer and build with a patience that borders on hypnotic. Reversed sound effects, stuttering basslines, melting tones that echo out into something that feels infinite. It is the kind of track that makes you want to close your eyes and let it rearrange your sense of where you are.

Naraka is another highlight, pairing gleaming pads with devotional samples over a heavy, ominous bed of beats and synths. It is an ocean of sound, vast and dark and strangely beautiful. All Reason Departs begins with those Crowley fragments and then unfolds into a low slung downtempo cut with one of the most compelling toplines the duo have produced in years. Blood in the Labyrinth gives the vocal samples more room to breathe, letting twangy, plucky melodies do most of the work, and it is better for it. Arena Americana feels like the opening theme of an obscure detective show that was cancelled after one season, which is meant as a compliment.

Not everything lands. The vocal samples can feel overbearing, particularly on Father and Son, where jittery, disorienting voice fragments are set against lumbering beats and creepy synth arpeggios in a way that is more grating than unsettling. The Process, with its garbled female synthesised voice speaking of bishops and atrocities over droning synths and radio interference, feels like it is trying too hard to be ominous. There are moments where you wish the brothers would step back and let the music speak for itself, because when they do, the results are spellbinding.

And they do, often enough. Deep Time features strings and tympani and flows seamlessly into All Reason Departs in a way that more of the album could have benefited from. Memory Death is an ambient sketch with buzzing flies and an inhaling chime that sounds like the old Skype login sound filtered through something sinister, and it is quietly one of the most effective tracks on the record. Somewhere Right Now in the Future takes a dream pop turn that feels unexpected and welcome. Into the Magic Land leans into post rock territory. The range is impressive, and it reminds you that Boards of Canada have never been just one thing.

The production throughout has a glassy clarity that distinguishes Inferno from the murkier textures of their earlier work. The guitars have an unusually gothic cast, almost as though the brothers spent the last thirteen years steeped in the Cure's Pornography. Live drums appear, giving tracks like Prophecy at 1420 MHz a physicality that the duo's earlier work often avoided. The phrase lengths are irregular, five bars and seven bars, wrongfooting your expectations, making you count beats and wonder if there is some meaning encoded in the patterning. There probably is not. But the intricacy of the clockwork makes you want to believe there might be, and that is part of the point.

Inferno is not a perfect record. The vocal samples divide more than they unite, and there are stretches where the conceptual weight threatens to overwhelm the musical experience. But it is a brave one, and a necessary one, and it sounds like exactly the record Boards of Canada wanted to make. Thirteen years is a long time to wait. But Inferno rewards the wait more often than not, and when it does, it reminds you why nobody else sounds quite like this.