by
Juno Daily
on 23.05.2026 at 06:09am.
Last edited: 22.05.2026 at 18:26pm.
Towering
As London bathes in the start of a May heatwave we’re ushered into the dark confines of a former Welsh chapel in the heart of London to listen to Boards of Canada’s new album, fittingly titled Inferno. 13 years on from their last release, Tomorrow’s Harvest, fans of the enigmatic Scottish downbeat electronic duo have had to dig for copies of lost archival tapes and leaks of decades old live recordings to satiate their desire for more music from the duo until mysterious tapes marked with a hexagon began to appear in the letterboxes of unknowing fans.
Stone Nest is bathed in red light and a throbbing industrial ambience sounds as we enter the main room. A voice declares that we consent to participate in a ‘mass behavioural initiative’ which may ‘alter minds’. Seven hexagons, themselves arranged into a larger hexagon, are projected on the ceiling with the subtle impression of a flickering fire across them as the lights dim.
The first track, Introit, kicks off the album with a nostalgic PBS-style synth melody before giving way to the darker Prophecy at 1420MHz which aptly sets the darker tone of the album. While Prophecy will feel familiar to long-time fans, the band experiments with unusual instrumentation like the raga-inspired flute found at the start of the track or even the heavy guitars, far removed from the folk inspired guitar work on The Campfire Headphase.
Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan continues along the path set by Prophecy as warbled, tape-saturated string pads are joined by echoing drums and a bass sound that straddles the line between organic and digital instrumentation. There isn’t constant darkness in the sound, a chord here or there provides some warmth and the metallic elements are eventually replaced by the uplifting sound of a soaring string orchestra, albeit still with the band’s iconic tape saturated sound.
On Age of Capricorn plucked synths accompany a sampled voice reciting an almost incomprehensible mantra – a series of letters followed by the word ‘marvelous’. The bassline that enters next serves to give the plucked arpeggios a sense of tonality, settling into something more major key in feel as the voice carries on; ‘I receive you’.
Sampled voices continue to feature heavily on the album, perhaps the most that Boards of Canada have used in an album to date. Father And Son is no exception as visceral bit-crushed drums are topped by a voice asking how a ‘brother, sister, or father could possibly be your enemy?’. The track slowly builds its dark synthesizer arpeggios before ending abruptly.
While the album doesn’t feature the short interludes that have come on previous releases, Somewhere Right Now In The Future feels in the same wheelhouse with its rolled piano chords drifting lazily between major and minor keys through a shoegazey, tape soundscape.
Naraka, the track’s name presumably taken from the Sanskrit word for the realm of hell in Indian religions, combines a classic take on the Boards of Canada sound with the new found instrumentation that features so much on Inferno. Bass led drums, longing synth pads with wobbling pitch and synthesized by bells are joined by a heavily treated choir that calls to mind religious chanting.
Acts of Magic is a somewhat more sinister take on the aforementioned ‘interludes’. A rhythmic droning bass is complimented by an eerie synthesized string pad and the sampled voices are so heavily treated as to become part of the instrumentation, and the only truly recognisable sampled sound is that of flies buzzing as the track ends. Memory Death follows with more drumless ambience as melancholy synth chords are driven along by a recurring ‘beep’ every bar.
Slow chord stabs are suddenly brought into tempo with a ratcheting 16th note high hat line on The Word Becomes Flesh, as a robotic, vocoded voice and a sampled clip discussing embryonic development play off each other over dissonant synths; a classic Boards of Canada sound.
The lead synth on Into The Magic Land sketches out the tonality of the song while the bassline jumps between the root and 5th of each chord in sequence. As the track progresses the instrumentation becomes progressively less digital as organic elements such as guitar and bass guitar are introduced – all the while the tonality never straying from the dark sound initially set up by the synthesizers.
A complex, ominous sequence of nine chords in two sections gives Blood In The Labyrinth a signature sound but the introduction of an unearthly sitar that follows the bassline is its most memorable moment as the sampled, garbled voices continue.
Deep Time will be familiar to those following the album’s launch as it is the musical backing from the mysterious ‘TAPE 05’ that was uploaded by the band in the buildup to the album release. Eerie William Basinski style tape loops are riffed over by a yearning synthesizer line before being totally recontextualised by a triumphant chord progression on synthesized strings and a harp.
The unsettling ambience that closes out Deep Time leads straight into All Reason Departs as sampled voices demand that ‘the great war must be fought’ and reference ‘the conquering child’ over shortwave radio static and driving drum beats. The shortwave radio interference continues into Arena Americanada with its whistling lead sounds and ascending bassline accompanied by an organ sound not dissimilar to the one on Deep Time.
A bass pedal note anchors The Process as a monolithic voice appears to bark commands over the top until, surprisingly, the whole track falls away leaving only a distant piano in the vein of the outro to Music Has The Right To Children’s Olson.
You Retreat In Time And Space is a rare break from the darkness of the rest of the album and feels like a brief return to the optimistic warmth of Music Has The Right to Children and The Campfire Headphase. It also marks the only time during the album that the visuals in the room change, the fiery hexagon instead serving as a window to blurred analogue images of landscapes and children. Finally, the album closes on a somber note, I Saw Through Platonia returning to the album’s dark tone after the brief interlude of the previous track.
The crowd applauds, the lights come up, and I’m soon thrust back into the scorching sun and hordes of tourists. Boards of Canada are adept at hiding all sorts of layered, nuanced, and hidden messages into their music and I’m certain it will take me many more listens before we can decode most of them. Our mind though? We think they’ve probably altered it successfully.
Charlie Wright
