Boards of Canada’s Inferno Maps the Descent After Tomorrow’s Harvest

The rollout for Boards of Canada’s first album in over a decade was as cryptic as their reputation demands. VHS tapes mailed to fans, posters near a Greenpoint record shop, and a hexagon logo beamed behind an altar at Judson Memorial Church. When the Scottish duo invited listeners inside the Manhattan cathedral to preview Inferno, the queue stretched around the building.

The record arrives as a direct sequel to 2013’s Tomorrow’s Harvest, which sketched a nuclear dystopia. Inferno picks up where that desolation ends, turning toward damnation. Aleister Crowley surfaces on “All Reason Departs.” “Naraka” borrows a Hare Krishna chant and the Sanskrit term for hell. The occult framing is deliberate, like a corporate brochure hiding a sinister message—an aesthetic familiar to anyone who has parsed the Reddit threads around Geogaddi’s 66:06 length.

Musically, the album leans away from the saccharine ambience of earlier works. “Prophecy At 1420 MHz” and “Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan” pull more from downtempo and flecks of dubstep than pure IDM. Robotic incantations on “Father And Son” and “Blood In The Labyrinth” carry the chintzy plunderphonic edge of their prime, while silvery guitars inch toward vaporwave and shoegaze. The result sounds less like a revival than a document of movements they helped shape.

Hours before release, the track “Deep Time” underscored a menacing White House video—an accidental synchronicity that felt grimly fitting. For a project that built its myth on analogue decay and hidden frequencies, the present still finds ways to amplify the signal.