For decades, Scottish brothers Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison, of course much better known as Boards of Canada, have occupied a strange and sacred space in electronic music. Their sounds are perhaps too emotionally bruised for IDM purists and yet too abstract for mainstream crowds, but that said their influence is impossible to ignore. Their fingerprints can be found everywhere now from lo-fi hip-hop, analog revivalism, nostalgia edits and even prestige horror scores. But following thirteen years of silence and an intense period of fan archeology their new double album Inferno arrives and it doesn’t seem interested in celebrating any kind of legacy. In fact it comes across so scarified and haunted that it feels genuinely terrifying.

If you’re a casual listener or follower of the duo you may not have scoured the internet’s sedimentary rocks for the minutia on Inferno, but it was always going to garner forensic scrutiny. Even in a new time where performers now have eras and drop parasocial breadcrumb trails for sometimes very little payoff there can be a dense wall put up against ‘understanding’ BoC, as fans search for Easter eggs and deeper ‘meaning.’ The brothers know the score, they fed the excitement last time around with Tomorrow’s Harvest (2013) when they drip fed puzzles, teased tracks and locations hidden in the metadata. They allowed online fan-theory and late-night Reddit rabbit holes to tease the release far better than any glossy marketing machine. They are eternal teases.

However this time around the music they’re making isn’t necessarily fun or even rewarding in the usual sense, in 2026 we hear them dealing with a slow-burning psychological collapse. Inferno is the sound of memory corroding in real time.

You need proof? Check out the tracklistings below. The words tell stories of spiritual faith, lost and found, belief and faith placed beyond the body and mind; in technology, in magic. It’s reactive and often pessimistic, if you’ve read other reviews you have encountered these descriptions about the music but it’s in there long before you hear the rumbled, heavy laden beats and distorted vocals stretch out over the album’s length.

It’s not hyperbole to see these songs in the context of something ‘biblical.’ The ambition and scale is there, they’re tackling enormous cerebral subjects. From ceremonial opener “Introit” with its sounds referencing the pairs lighter back catalogue before segueing into “Prophecy at 1420 MHz,” it is unnerving, just as Geogaddi was sparked by the 9/11 attacks, Inferno flickers and feels like listening to the dying embers of a civilisation. It’s so difficult not to get too overblown with the theology, the humanity (or lack of) or even how mesmerising collapse can be. Horrifyingly beautiful like nuclear test footage.  

These songs aren’t composed of classic BoC childhood memories scorched and melted onto warm tape, they depict a cosmological birth and death. “Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan” – incidentally the first three elements of the periodic table followed by a massive mythical monster, make of that what you will sleuths – sets up recurring motifs about judgement, prophecy, corruption and technological ruin. Tomorrow’s Harvest imagined societal collapse from afar whereas Inferno walks through the wreckage almost resigned to the inevitable.

The album’s greatest strength is how often it resists becoming oppressive. BoC still understands melody better than most and “Age of Capricorn” glows with faded warmth, a glimpse of simpler times. “Acts of Magic” is heartbreak compressed into barely more than a minute. Even “Somewhere Right Now in the Future” carries the duo’s signature emotional sleight-of-hand, melancholy that somehow feels comforting. The eastern influences on “Naraka” and “Blood In The Labyrinth” blur musical styles and boundaries which is what their music has always done best.

Not everything lands cleanly. At nearly seventy minutes, Inferno occasionally sinks beneath its own conceptual weight. “Memory Death”, “The Word Becomes Flesh” and “Into The Magic Land” all seem murky in their ambient drift, and spoken-word samples feel more cryptic than perhaps elsewhere. There’s also an insistent, and rather on the nose, pinging of a heart monitor on the first of these just in case things weren’t obvious enough. But even these moments contribute to the album’s atmosphere because they’re less concerned with individual songs than psychological immersion.

As the latter third of the album takes over and we’re met with a mix of consumerist backlash, the glistening corporate-tronica of “Arena Americanada” or capitalist dystopia by way of “The Process,” which nods knowingly to Radiohead’s “Fitter Happier.” These then break cover for a more ethereal and timeless feel in the closing pair of “You Retreat In Time And Space” and “I Saw Through Platonia” as humanity dissipates into the colossal universe perhaps destroyed, freed, or escaping. It means the album ends on a subdued note but also leaves you feeling safe somehow, rescued. Then it can loop back around to the start and the celestial cycle begins anew.

You will need to listen to Inferno many many times to tease out everything, for years maybe, until their next release a decade or more from now. If we’re still here. And that’s the enduring appeal of Boards of Canada, they make music that lasts lifetimes and bears scrutiny, enjoyment and re-listening even when we’re staring at a troubling future.

Inferno feels like a lot of things. Defiantly ancient. Universal. Disturbing. A distress beacon transmission dug out from the future. It’s uncommercial in the sense of how album streaming and release cycles now come and it’s best to listen in total surrender. And while it may not surpass Music Has the Right to Children or Geogaddi in terms of wider crossover appeal it accomplishes something arguably harder by proving Boards of Canada still possess mysteries worth chasing.

9/10

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Inferno track list:

01. Introit
02. Prophecy At 1420 MHz
03. Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan
04. Age Of Capricorn
05. Father And Son
06. Somewhere Right Now In The Future
07. Naraka
08. Acts Of Magic
09. Memory Death
10. The Word Becomes Flesh
11. Into The Magic Land
12. Blood In The Labyrinth
13. Deep Time
14. All Reason Departs
15. Arena Americanada
16. The Process
17. You Retreat In Time And Space
18. I Saw Through Platonia

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