Boards Of Canada Return And Now I Feel Complete

13 years.

It has been a whopping 13 years since the great Scottish electronic brother duo Boards of Canada have released a new album. Tomorrow’s Harvest arrived in June of 2013 after another long turn between albums with their last album The Campfire Headphase coming out in 2005.

I get it. Their records are worlds within themselves. The attention to detail, the layers of sound, the narrative journeys involved in a BoC record are rich in depth and are like musical puzzles meant to be solved over years of repeated listening. You certainly can just zone out to the downtempo beats and melancholy melodies that they create, but with headphones on Boards of Canada’s sonic worlds open up in much deeper, meaningful, and headier ways. It’s like a time machine you take to some dreamt up version of 1970s and early 1980s. Their albums feel like soundtracks to latchkey kid adventures; stranger danger, afterschool specials, underfinanced summer camps, and seemingly a desolate landscape where parents barely exist.

But man, 13 years is a long time. A scary long time where you think maybe they’re just done. They came and changed the landscape of electronic music and decided to just walk the Scottish countryside in search of new meaning in what feels like a meaningless world. Thankfully that wasn’t case, and that they were just taking the time they needed to make their next masterpiece.

At the end of May we will be gifted the best musical gift of the year in the form of Inferno, Boards of Canada’s new album. 18 tracks and 70 minutes of brand new songs that just from the album title alone feels as if they waited for just the right time to release. I mean, the world certainly feels like an inferno currently, burning into oblivion at a high rate of speed.

What we’ve heard musically is simply titled “Tape 05”, referring to a series of mysterious tapes that were sent out out to random fans a couple weeks ago. The music sounds cinematic, grand, and emotionally rich. It could be the sound of a world beginning, or ending. There’s a dream-like quality, once again giving us a feeling of time travel to some other time. An analog world where tape takes on a new life the more it gets played. A woozy, gauzy feeling that has an almost anesthetized quality as you fall into the music.

Regardless, it’s a stunning return from one of my absolute favorite bands.

After the last month I’ve had music has been that one constant for me. It’s offered the kind of mental and spiritual healing that I’ve needed while swerving my way through these medical adventures. And now with a brand new Boards of Canada album to look forward to in little over a month, I’m feeling even better.

Hail Boards of Canada. Hail Inferno.