Thirteen years is a strange amount of time to wait for anything, let alone a follow-up record from a band whose entire mythology is built on disappearing. So when Boards of Canada's Inferno finally arrived on May 29, after months of unmarked VHS tapes and cryptic posters, the question wasn't just whether it would be good. It was whether the Sandison brothers could still surprise anyone after all this silence. They can.
Inferno is, fittingly, the duo's most explicitly religious and apocalyptic record since 2002's Geogaddi. The title leans into imagery of hell and the underworld, marking the band's most direct engagement with religion and the occult since that earlier album. Track titles read like fragments of scripture and cosmology in equal measure: Introit, The Word Becomes Flesh, Naraka, I Saw Through Platonia. This is not subtle territory for a band that has always preferred suggestion to statement, and several critics noted the album feels less like an escape into a half-remembered past and more like a direct response to the present. Beats Per Minute's Todd Dedman described the record as missing the amniotic fluid quality of the back catalogue in favor of a more clinical, driven feel, while still inhabiting the present moment rather than a re-imagined past.
Sonically, this is still unmistakably Boards of Canada, warped synths, sampled voices surfacing and submerging, melodies that feel simultaneously comforting and faintly wrong, but the textures have shifted. Live drums and electric guitars feature far more prominently than before, giving several tracks an unusually gothic, almost post-punk character, a quality Pitchfork's Philip Sherburne also picked up on. It's a record that sounds more physically played than programmed, which is new for a duo whose past work often felt like it was excavated from old tape reels rather than performed.
The lead single, Prophecy at 1420 MHz, points toward one of the album's clearer organizing ideas: 1420 megahertz is the hydrogen line frequency associated with the famous Wow! signal, long speculated to be a possible extraterrestrial transmission. It's a fitting emblem for a record that keeps circling questions of faith, origin, and whether anyone, or anything, is listening back. The closing track, I Saw Through Platonia, takes its title from physicist Julian Barbour's theory of a timeless landscape in which past, present, and future coexist, a fitting note to end on for a band that has always treated memory as something fluid rather than fixed.
Is Inferno a masterpiece on the level of Music Has the Right to Children? Probably not, nothing quite recaptures the specific alchemy of a debut that reshaped a genre. But as a fifth album arriving after thirteen years of total silence, it does something arguably harder: it sounds essential rather than nostalgic, urgent rather than backward-looking. For a band this allergic to repeating itself, that might be the highest compliment available.
