Thirteen years of silence from Boards of Canada is finally over. The Scottish electronic duo has announced Inferno, an 18-track double album due May 29 on Warp Records in digital, CD, and 2xLP formats.
The announcement ends one of the longer droughts in modern electronic music. Brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin last released an album in 2013 with Tomorrow's Harvest, which became their commercial peak, hitting No. 7 in the United Kingdom and No. 13 on the Billboard 200. Then, nothing.
Not quite nothing. In 2019, a previously unreleased track from a 1998 Peel Session surfaced on a Warp 30th anniversary package. Last week, the duo released "Tape 05," a meditative track dropped quietly through a cryptic social media campaign involving hexagonal imagery and sun-bleached video footage. That track does not appear on Inferno's tracklist.
The album spans 70 minutes across 18 tracks with titles like "Prophecy At 1420 MHz," "Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan," "Memory Death," and "I Saw Through Platonia." The track names alone signal that the duo has lost none of its taste for cosmic, slightly unsettling atmosphere. The opener is called "Introit." The closer: "I Saw Through Platonia."
Boards of Canada has always operated at a remove from the music industry's normal rhythms. They rarely give interviews. Live performances have been a handful, mostly clustered around the late 1990s and early 2000s. Official music videos are few enough to count on one hand. Their reputation rests almost entirely on the music itself and a devoted fanbase that has spent years parsing cryptic signals for any sign of new material.
Their impact on electronic music is difficult to quantify in conventional metrics. Streams and chart positions tell only part of the story for a duo whose influence runs through ambient, IDM, and experimental production in ways that show up long after the listening is done.
Inferno is available for pre-order and pre-save at boardsofcanada.com.