Boards of Canada’s ‘Inferno’ Closes A24’s ‘Backrooms’

On Friday, Boards of Canada released Inferno, ending 13 years of silence. The same day, A24 put out Backrooms, Kane Parsons’ feature adaptation of his YouTube series born from a 4chan meme about a yellow-walled room. The overlap goes deeper than the calendar. The Inferno track “The World Becomes Flesh” plays over the film’s end credits.

Parsons, still under 21, cited ambient music as an influence in a recent GQ interview. He and composer Edo Van Breemen built the score with Aphex Twin, Burial, and Boards of Canada in mind. Parsons also makes his own music, releasing it on the Not Kane Pixels channel. For him, Inferno is only the second Boards of Canada album released in his lifetime, a fact that makes the pairing feel less like coincidence and more like cultural alignment.

Both projects traffic in uncanny familiarity, the kind of feeling that’s hard to name but impossible to shake. A Reddit user called the connection a month ago, a guess that now looks prescient. Unlike the unauthorized use of Boards of Canada’s music by the Trump administration, this collaboration stems from a shared sensibility. It fits, in the uneasy way things do in liminal spaces.