Experimental Electronic Music
I trust BoC to make something interesting and emotionally effective, but when it comes to their music’s meaning, they’re slippery and mysterious. Inferno is a collection of pieces that grapple with scary feelings, scary beliefs, and the inescapable feeling that you can only trust your senses so far.
What began as speculation over a possible new Boards of Canada release evolved into a meditation on how their rare and mysterious presence awakens a profound collective longing for beauty, unity, and transcendence in an increasingly fragmented world.
After 13 years of silence, Boards of Canada returned not simply with new music, but with a surreal, memory-soaked communion at Barnsdall Gallery Theatre where every fading ray of sunset, whispering pine, analog pulse, and hushed breath among 300 devoted listeners made Inferno feel less like an album preview and more like a long-lost transmission finally reaching home.
Boards of Canada return in unmistakable form, diving deep into the shadowy downtempo atmosphere that made them legendary — a hypnotic state of consciousness suspended between nostalgia, decay, and dreamlike transmission. “Introit” and “Prophecy At 1420 MHz” are the first two tracks unveiled from the forthcoming album Inferno, arriving May 29, 2026 on Warp Records.
If Tomorrow’s Harvest was the collapse of the physical world, Inferno is the processing of the digital soul. We have moved from a famine of the body to a harvest of the mind.
Boards of Canada today announce Inferno, their first full-length release in thirteen years, marking a significant return for the influential Scottish electronic duo. This forthcoming record expands their unmistakable sonic identity, introducing a darker, more intricately layered atmosphere that refracts their hallmark sense of warped nostalgia through a more shadowed lens.
Boards of Canada didn’t just shape how we hear music — they reshaped how we experience reality, and Geogaddi remains their most unsettling proof: a deliberately disorienting, symbol-laced descent where warmth masks dread and mystery is the message.
Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children stands as a quintessential cornerstone of downtempo electronic music—a seminal release that propelled the enigmatic duo of Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin into a boundless realm of nostalgic reverie. In this edition of our “Flashback” column, Anne Jackson revisits the album’s haunting landscapes, with particular focus on “Telephasic Workshop,” a track that encapsulates a paradoxical beauty: at once claustrophobic and transcendent in its sonic intricacy.
Here, time blurs. Languid pulses, dusky synth-lines, erratic vocal fragments, and serpentine grooves conjure a place half-remembered—at once familiar and untethered, a kind of sonic déjà vu.
Fresh from his music being picked up for a Ridley Scott Netflix production, Dalham brings the required noise in Cobra / And The Sun, a twin release from the estimable Castles in Space set to alter states across the planet.
Drawing comparisons to brothers Sandison and Eoin and a handful of like-minded artists such as Faex Optim, Skytree, Zachary Gray, Pentagrams Of Discordia, clocolan, Hanut Munson, The OST, Christ., and Sinerider, Sea of Suns maintains a grounded, elemental essence.
