BoC‘s first new album in thirteen years is as enriching and musically compelling as the mythology that surrounds their work.
Release date: May 29, 2026 | Warp Records | Bandcamp | Website
‘Energy is becoming one of our country’s greatest concerns
If we don’t start working on energy conservation
There may not be enough energy to go around by the time I’m a parent‘
I was introduced to Boards of Canada as a high schooler via the intro to this quick interlude off of their second album, Geogaddi. The nostalgic interlude, bluntly titled “Energy Warning”, dates back to 2002, and its call to action is a sample of a 4-H public service announcement from 1979, but the overall message remains universal today – I’m thinking it doesn’t take a staunch environmentalist to understand why. Once I heard the track’s ominous opening chords over rushing water, followed by a child’s garbled dialogue, it was like I was immediately transported back to the early days of Children’s Television Workshop. It had a warm, vintage varnish over it, and yet it also sounded like nothing else I’d ever heard in music before. As a snobby teenage iconoclast, it was enough to draw me right in, mainly because there was something about Boards of Canada that was rather… mystical.
I later found out that this artist is not even Canadian while doing research for this review – seriously, it’s a brotherly duo hailing from Scotland. Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin are the principal members of BoC, and they primarily compose electronic IDM clusters that range from ambient and atmospheric to psychedelic and even somewhat sinister. They do more than just blur genre lines. They distort them. And to add to the mystique, BoC rarely ever participate in interviews or make public appearances. They are now exclusively a studio band, with their last live concert being 25 years ago. Despite having been putting out music since the late 1990s, this enigmatic twosome has previously put out only four albums, with their debut Music Has the Right to Children and follow-up Geogaddi arguably being their peak. Two more albums followed – 2005’s The Campfire Headphase and 2013’s Tomorrow’s Harvest – before BoC took a lengthy hiatus from the studio.
This of course brings us to where they are currently: their fifth album and first in 13 years, Inferno. Not only is this BoC‘s most sonically foreboding album to date, but it also damn near fully lives up to the hype, utilizing live guitars, synths, and even drums to help differentiate it from their other releases while still retaining their signature aura of nostalgic obscurity. The execution of Inferno is as enriching and compelling as the mythology that surrounds the rest of their work. Sandison may have been the sole producer of this album – a slight contrast from when both he and Eoin contributed to production for previous albums – but when listening to this surprise release time and time again, the ominous tone of “Energy Warning” as well as other tracks on Geogaddi, for example, hits real hard on Inferno and is no less epic.
As demonstrated by the video on BoC‘s official YouTube channel, “Introit” bleeding into “Prophecy at 1420 MHz” is the moment where their colossal ambitions take off for the journey – a journey straight into a cult-like atmosphere. Whether it’s the Satanic occult, a Christian nationalist cult, or a cult of personality (or is it all three?) remains entirely up to our interpretation. From there, we get all kinds of uncanny vocal samples (“Father and Son”), trip hop-influenced beats (“Naraka”), and haunting synthesized patchworks (“Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan”). Mind you, this album is roughly 70 minutes long and has a penchant for causing tonal whiplash, so easily digestible BoC‘s Inferno is not, unless you are actively looking for an adventure all the way to hell and back again.
Still, Inferno allows more than enough room for its gentle ambient moments. “Introit”‘s arpeggios bubble with innocence, “Somewhere Right Now in the Future” coasts along on a wave of dreamy guitar ambience à la Hammock, and “Memory Death”‘s analog synths evoke the same vintage warmth of their earliest work. In the latter case, the song’s melodic throughline reminds me very much of the closing passage to Filter‘s Crazy Eyes album, but also of BoC‘s own “Energy Warning” of course. And this is just the first half! Towards the back half of the album, there aren’t too many other spaces to breathe, but at least you still have the uplifting tune “You Retreat in Time and Space” and the heartbeat pulse of “I Saw Through Platonia”, the one-two punch of a conclusion reminding us of our utter humanity in a time when AI threatens to replace that.
Depending on how Inferno‘s thematic content is construed by other people, this is the sort of project that could reach the wrong audience very easily. Case in point: the Trump administration, who used the thirteenth track from Inferno, “Deep Time”, as background audio for their xenophobic propaganda slop (‘slopaganda?’) without artist or label authorization. Unsurprisingly, BoC‘s label Warp Records condemned this, and the duo promptly put out a statement saying that they ‘do not condone the unauthorised use of their music for political messaging‘. Apparently, the far right learned nothing from the time Trent Reznor blasted Fox News for using ambient Nine Inch Nails tracks without permission.
Look, I get it – shit’s fucked up right now. Inferno, as many sources have said before, is indeed pertinent to our zeitgeist, which means that we should probably take every bit of sampled cult dialogue with a grain of salt and enjoy the music for what it is. It could either unironically be the soundtrack to a hellish nightmare… or it could perhaps be the catalyst for change and the resistance to our rapidly decaying status quo. Boards of Canada may be from Scotland, after all, but much like with the message of their “Energy Warning” interlude, the sentiment is universal. Even when everything else is shrouded in mystery.
