Turn off the lights. Put on the best headphones you own. Drive into the nearest forest and don’t look back. That’s the optimal way to experience Inferno, the long-awaited fifth album from Scottish brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin.
Someone smarter than me once said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Well, writing about IDM in particular is like chatting your way through a combined Sociology and Philosophy 101 seminar. Now that I think about it, that perfectly matches the gurned-out state you might find yourself in during the chill-out room of a rave. And that space has always been the natural habitat of Boards of Canada’s music. So let’s try anyway.
For 13 long years, Boards of Canada been missing in action . It’s their longest vanishing act yet, punctuated only by 2019’s Societas X Tape—a sprawling, esoteric mix for Warp’s 30th anniversary. In hindsight, it reads as a subtle roadmap for where Inferno would go. The clues were there; nobody connected them. And then, a few weeks ago, fans received unmarked VHS tapes in the post. Of course they did.
Here’s the thing about that campaign: in a world absolutely strangled by advertising, where artists overshare their breakfast and breakdowns in equal measure, the almost aggressive lack of explanation from Sandison and Eoin might be the most effective marketing move in music right now. Cryptic websites, wordless posters, and a refusal to spell anything out feels both maddening and brilliant. The dystopian future 1980s sci-fi and late-night anime promised has arrived. It just feels a bit… dull. And Boards of Canada are anything but.
Sonically, Inferno marks a genuine shift. The narcotic drift of their earlier records has been rewired into something new. The rhythm section has a crisper, coiled-spring energy that keeps you slightly off balance even as the atmospheres wash over you. The speech samples are the real revelation. American voices fracture into something subtly wrong, looping and overlapping until they blur into the instrumentation. Cult sincerity, public address system menace, and talk-radio static collapse into a fever dream of a country eating itself. Think Eno and Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, recorded in a bunker in 2026, and you’re in the right postcode.
Is it space paganism? Techno-occult? Analogue robot noise for people who read too much Jung? Honestly, yes. All of the above, and that’s exactly why it works. Inferno stands as their most explicitly dark record since 2002’s Geogaddi. It tracks the genuinely weird and frightening forces moving through the world without spelling them out. Sandison and Eoin have put it clearly: explain the tracks, and you ruin them. They prefer everything seen through the bottom of a murky glass. Same.
Inferno reminds you that breathing is an option. Beneath the relentless noise of 2026, other frequencies, stranger and older and more honest. So, put the phone down. Drive into the dark. Let it find you.