Boards of Canada : Inferno

Boards of Canada’s music has always felt relevant, commenting on society thru ghostly voices and nostalgically-tinted electronics. Music Has The Right To Children, their first full-length from 1998, sounded like walking back in time with its faded audio clips and analog electronics and instrumentation. It felt familiar and foreign simultaneously. The follow-up, Geogaddi(2002), was seeped in the occult and a sense of being haunted. It felt like ritual music, summoning something from another place and time. And The Campfire Headphase(2005) was a mixture of the two; summer camp visions with a darkness on the edge of it all.

It took Scottish brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin 8 years to follow up The Campfire Headphase, and that album was Tomorrow’s Harvest(2013). It was a record that leaned heavily into a future dystopia; landscapes painted from emptied cities like in Romero zombie movies, while a sense of something sinister growing to take over what was left. It wasn’t a seismic shift in tone from what came before, but there was a subtle doomed proclamation in those songs that hinted at a world ready for collapse.

After 13 long years we now have the return of Boards of Canada in Inferno, a slice of sonic brilliance and production wizardry. Over the course of 70 minutes and 18 songs, Boards of Canada send us on a music journey that feels tapped into the chaos we now live in. It’s dark, ominous, and at times quite beautiful. The 13 years was well worth the wait.

There’s no mistaking this is a Boards of Canada record. From the opening salvo of “Introit” you are brought back into a familiar sonic world. It’s a short portal before entering “Prophecy at 1420 MHz”, a mysterious and haunted journey. It’s a piece that delves almost into post-punk territory. You could hear a 25-year old Robert Smith singing doomed lyrics over this music. This is new territory for BoC. “Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan” is a sonic hallucination, all psychedelic swirls backed by a hard electro beat. “Age of Capricorn” is a subtle piece, with a distorted voice seemingly coming from some other realm. A voice like a cult leader arriving halfway thru.

Audio clips play a much bigger role on Inferno, with “Father and Son” standing out with what feels like a back and forth conversation. Cut to the rhythm of the song, it sounds like eerie artificial intelligence gaining sentience. At times it also sounds like robots making a hip hop track.

Inferno delves into everything, from BoC’s usual downtempo electronica to post-punk and even post-rock. The instrumentation feels more live than it ever has as the production is the best we’ve ever heard from them. Everything is a standout here, but tracks like “Somewhere Right Now In The Future”, “Memory Death”, “The World Becomes Flesh”, and “All Reason Departs” make the argument that this may be the best Boards of Canada album yet.

Inferno was long in the works, but well worth the wait. Boards of Canada have just dropped the best album of the year. It’s their most engaging, dense, and urgent record yet.