Boards of Canada Schedule Early Listening Events for New Album ‘Inferno’

Boards of Canada will give listeners an advance chance to hear their new album, Inferno, through live listening events in seven cities. The sessions take place a week before the record’s late May release, a deliberate fissure in the near-silence the duo has maintained since 2013’s Tomorrow’s Harvest.

The events touch down in Tokyo, Berlin, Barcelona, London, Glasgow, New York, and Los Angeles. Exact venues remain unconfirmed, but pre-sale ticket registration is open now, with a general sale set for Friday, May 1. The move is more significant than a standard promo run. For an act that rarely offers any direct interface with its audience, these small gatherings represent a bizarrely transparent gesture.

Inferno spans 18 tracks and will land on vinyl, CD, and digital formats. The album’s announcement last week arrived with the same restraint the duo has always deployed. Meanwhile, the listening events hint at something less guarded. For a handful of hours, selected rooms will hear what the rest of the world cannot for another seven days.

The practical details are still thin, but the framing is clear. Boards of Canada are choosing to let the music sit alone in a room with people, no screen in between. That alone feels like a significant shift in tone for a project built on distance.