No, it’s not a drill: Boards of Canada is all set to release an album of new material.
The electronic music act will crush a decade-plus drought next month with the release of Inferno, an 18-track double album that will spread across 70 minutes.
Inferno‘s tracklist, which can be seen below, doesn’t feature the meditative track “Tape 05,” which BoC and Warp Records dished up last week, an easter egg in an unexpected cryptic social media drip feed.
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For BoC’s long-suffering fans, Inferno is a bolt from the blue. The duo’s last album, 2013’s Tomorrow’s Harvest, proved to be their biggest commercial success, based on international chart placings.
Then, deafening quiet. Thirteen years of it.
Only the most hopelessly optimistic BoC fans would’ve anticipated a new era. And yet here we are, with confirmation coming by way of separate social posts, one combining dramatic, but minimal, BoC music, with hexagonal imagery and video cut from a simpler time. It’s sunburnt nostalgia, bottled.
Boards of Canada is comprised of Scottish brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin, a universe-building pair that is both enigmatic, secretive and adored by connoisseurs of minimal electronic music.
The siblings rarely give interviews, they’ve performed only a small handful of live shows, mostly in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and their official music videos can be counted on one hand.
BoC’s impact shouldn’t be measured in hits, or streams. Though their fourth and most recent album release, Tomorrow’s Harvest, did set career chart highs for the act. That collection peaked at No. 7 in the United Kingdom, for their first top 10 entry, and at No. 13 on the Billboard 200, their first appearance on the all-genres U.S. albums chart.
A comeback of sorts emerged in 2019 with “XYZ,” a previously-unreleased tune from their Peel Session of July 1998, which appeared on a new Warp Records 30th anniversary package, WXAXRXP Sessions.
Inferno is due out May 29 in digital, CD and 2xLP formats. Check out the Inferno tracklist, and latest BoC social posts below. Pre-order and pre-save at boardsofcanada.com.
Inferno tracklist:
- — “Introit”
- — “Prophecy At 1420 MHz”
- — “Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan”
- — “Age Of Capricorn”
- — “Father And Son”
- — “Somewhere Right Now In The Future”
- — “Naraka”
- — “Acts Of Magic”
- — “Memory Death”
- — “The Word Becomes Flesh”
- — “Into The Magic Land”
- — “Blood In The Labyrinth”
- — “Deep Time”
- — “All Reason Departs”
- — “Arena Americanada”
- — “The Process”
- — “You Retreat In Time And Space”
- — “I Saw Through Platonia”
