“Please play the continuous mix for the full listening experience where possible,” reads a note on my promo of Boards of Canada’s first album in 13 years, which is technically split into 18 tracks. Even if I click on individual songs, the stream doesn’t display their actual titles, deterring me from making inferences like, “This is the one where you’re supposed to retreat into time and space,” or, “This is the one where the world becomes flesh.” Inferno is a dense, foreboding 70 minutes that can and should naturally be experienced as a whole, so much so that decontextualizing any of of its tracks feels criminal – a point underscored by the obscene news that, as I started writing this review, the White House’s social media account had just used the elusive Scottish duo’s ‘Deep Time’, the single originally unveiled as ‘Tape 05’, for its nationalist propaganda. But sticking to the track-by-track format for this article solidified my impression that as much as Inferno mirrors the current cultural hellscape, its intermittent cheerfulness and beauty aren’t vestiges of the past but baked into the same moment. Press pause at your own risk.
1. Introit
BOC signal their return with half a minute of swirling arpeggios, as familiar as the rising sun before an ominous cloud hovers into view.
2. Prophecy at 1420 MHz
It doesn’t take long for the album’s live sound to lock into place; the drums bristle with tension even as the darkening soundscape becomes murkier, hosting a Godly computerized voice that sort of introduces the album’s religious framework. For now, it’s purely unnerving.
3. Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan
BOC keep thickening the record’s quickly disquieting atmosphere with a broad palette of instrumentation, centred by a melody that swings halfway between haunting lullaby and spy thriller theme.
4. Age of Capricorn
The biblical voice returns over radiant synths that aren’t too far off from the ambient interludes on, say, Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres, if you were to swap its interstellar messages for prayer. Take that for what you will, but BOC naturally keep the meaning elusive even as they briefly crystallize their sound.
5. Father and Son
What if Cameron Winter struggled to believe God is real and started experimenting with chopped-up vocals and funky grooves? Would it sound any less confounding than this?
6. Somewhere Right Now in the Future
BOC get back to basics here, and the result is enchanting: two and a half minutes of resonant synth echoing through weathered guitar, like a dialogue between the present and a cracked future.
7. Naraka
Inferno’s spiritual tapestry starts to get muddled as the group samples people chanting the Hare Krishna mantra, so listlessly that if you weren’t looking at the track title, you’d have no idea it’s named after the Buddhist realm of suffering.
8. Acts of Magic
The only track on the album that qualifies as an interlude, just over a minute of throbbing menace and background recordings that actually paint a hellish landscape, or at least usher us into the next iteration of it.
9. Memory Death
You might expect the mid-album cut to be the most liminal composition, but it’s also one of Inferno’s best: deploying no blatant signifiers, it transmutes straight from a limbo state of suspended humanity, complete with spine-chilling ethereal vocals that could suck the breath of you. Even the most rhythmically insistent tracks here aren’t so visceral.
10. The World Becomes Flesh
The juxtaposition of robotic and human voices might distract from the track’s description of the development of an embryo, but it’s one of the most effectively interesting uses of sampling on the record, neither too straightforward nor frustratingly obscured. Educational, even.
11. Into the Magic Land
BOC journey back into non-discursive, spectral territory, punctuating the record’s live band feelwith early post-rock and shoegaze influences. It sounds like their version of paradise: vaporous, expansive, and unmarred by human language.
12. Blood in the Labyrinth
“You shed your blood for me,” a voice intones earlier on the record, and here it is creeping back up over muffled percussion and detuned synths. The main hook drags on a little aimlessly, but you barely notice.
13. Deep Time
You could mistake this for another interlude, but its heavenly reverberations unfurl patiently, sounds barely buzzing and crackling underneath the celestial expanse.
14. All Reason Departs
Looking up the passage that opens the track – “There is a Magical operation of maximum importance,” written by legendary occultist Aleister Crowley – I discovered that Dutch DJ/producer Angerfist interpolated the very same quote on his album Pissin’ Razorbladez, which is pretty funny. The sinister incantation gives way to a typically corroded groove that tumbles over for a full six minutes.
15. Arena Americanada
Muscular synths and zippy bass take center stage on the cheekily titled ‘Arena Americanada’, nearly embracing a kitschy bombast BOC have historically been averse to before drifting back into the ether.
16. The Process
Unlike ‘The World Becomes Flesh’, it’s harder to discern what process the artificial voice is outlining on this track, which is underpinned by crowd noises that diffuse into wistful piano, the echo of abject horror.
17. You Retreat in Time and Space
If ‘You Retreat in Time and Space’ sounds like a beautiful Boards of Canada tune, I’m happy to report that it also is: a respite of delicate pads and supple bass that launches into a shimmery, plainly anachronistic groove about halfway through, as if to erase the memory of bloodshed.
18. I Saw Through Platonia
A single heartbeat plods like the last remnant of rhythm in a desolate wasteland, as if to hum: This is what it all boils down to.
