I don’t normally write about music any more, but I feel compelled to write about the new Boards of Canada album, Inferno. It has far exceeded my expectations. I can’t remember the last time I was so immediately hooked on an album — 15 or 20 years ago, or longer.
This album has made me feel like a teenager again.
Their last album, Tomorrow’s Harvest, is old enough to be a teenager. 13 years on from their last significant activity, I had given up hope of ever hearing new material from them. I had stopped caring about the idea as well.
Their last two albums were not as good as their first two albums. This made it 24 years since they last made a great album. So how good could a BOC comeback be? I reasoned: What is the point in expecting?
Teaser campaign: Beginning to expect
That started to change when chosen people received mysterious VHS tapes on Easter Monday. The videos were cryptic. But they unmistakably signalled that BOC is risen.
Still, I kept my expectations in check. After all, Tomorrow’s Harvest had its own incredible promotional campaign. But the album itself couldn’t reach the heights of their glory days.
Ten days after reports of the VHS tape emerged, another cryptic video appeared on official social media channels. Called Tape 05, the video contained imagery associated with religious cults. That was a familiar subject in BOC’s earlier material, but a topic they had not touched since 2002’s Geogaddi.
The music in the video was wonderful. Melodically and texturally, it had the hallmarks of a great BOC tune. The core melody was striking, with an unexpected and brilliant resolution. A dissonant hint of menace was laced through it. The production also sounded stunning. Most unexpectedly, a harp took centre stage.
But a few minutes of good music wasn’t enough to set my mind at ease that BOC could create a great album in 2026.
Formal build-up: Beginning to believe
The following week, Inferno was formally announced. At first I suspected it would a climate-themed album, following on from the apocalyptic tone of Tomorrow’s Harvest. But the teaser video also contained imagery evoking religion, revealing the title to more likely be referring to hell. The artwork was not aesthetically pleasing, but it conveyed a clear vibe.
It all signalled clearly that BOC meant business. I climbed aboard the hype plane.
While the pre-release marketing campaign was playing out, anticipation ratcheted up. Olivier Egli in Igloo Magazine vividly described the unique sense of communal belonging a run-up to a new Boards of Canada album unlocks for fans.
A few weeks Inferno was announced, BOC released a single: Introit / Prophecy At 1420 MHz (also the first two tracks from the album). It far exceeded my expectations. It literally was everything you could expect from BOC and more.
Characteristics of each of their previous albums were present. But with those familiar sounds came a whole new set of elements. Those old and new components synthesised into a new aesthetic.
It still inhabited a kind of liminal space between the past and the future that is somehow not the present, as is BOC’s trademark. But it brought with it a high-quality sheen and attention to detail that suggested BOC have unlocked new powers since we last heard from them.
It also came with a stunning video, only their third, and easily their best.
In true BOC style, the whole thing begged to be decoded. 1420 MHz is the frequency emitted by hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe. As such, it is hypothesised to be the frequency that extraterrestrials would use to communicate.
In 1977 the Wow! signal was detected at this frequency. This is thought by some to be evidence of extraterrestrial life. The signal was received for 72 seconds. Fans worked out that the vocodered vocal in the middle of the song lasts for exactly 72 seconds.
They also quickly figured out the source of the words — cut-up fragments from a 2003 lecture by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, In the Beginning Was Consciousness.
There, he argued that in all major religions, consciousness is the foundation of the universe and all reality. He said that scientific rationalism has lost sight of something, by reducing the universe only to observable particles. He further argued that this has ultimately caused humanity to stop caring for our environment.
The single’s video and subject matter, along with the track titles for the album, suggested that the universe and time would be a major theme of Inferno. It also confirmed that there would be many mysteries to unlock. This is a core part of the BOC experience that was largely absent from their most disappointing album, The Campfire Headphase.
But the memory of that disappointment looms large.
Initial mixed reviews
As reviews trickled in the week before Inferno’s release, the reaction seemed to be deeply mixed. Reports from the listening events that took place in seven cities around the world, giving people a chance to hear the album a week in advance, delivered an unclear verdict.
Then came a negative review in the Guardian, describing the album as “a big disappointment”. But the review contained a couple of odd remarks that reduced its credibility.
A description of their 2000 track Amo Bishop Roden as “proto-dubstep” somehow gave the sense that the reviewer had heard neither Amo Bishop Roden nor any dubstep. He also suggested that the inclusion of guitars was an expansion of BOC’s range. This is misguided given that they have used guitars on-and-off throughout their history, most notably throughout The Campfire Headphase.
Reading it alongside the Financial Times’ review also made it seem like the two reviewers had exchanged notes and agreed to back each other up. They both gave it two stars and drew musical comparisons to the Avalanches (who themselves took 16 years to deliver their tepid second album).
Edinburgh’s listening party
With a mixture of trepidation and excitement, I went to my local record shop, which played host to Edinburgh’s only listening party for Inferno. Thorne Records is a great shop, just a 15 minute walk away from my home.
I didn’t think I was being particularly early to join the queue, but I also didn’t want to miss out on getting the swag (keyring, patch, poster and sticker in a BOC-branded brown envelope). When I arrived, there were only two people in front of me. Over the course of the following hour or so until the shop opened, those two people left, making me the first into the shop.
One of the draws of Boards of Canada is the mystery behind their music. On top of the cryptic subliminal messages that invite you to decode them, they have cultivated a reclusive personality. Legend had it that they lived somewhere inconceivably remote called the Pentland hills.
This mysterious image is a curious phenomenon if you live in Edinburgh. The Pentland hills don’t seem terribly remote from here. I can see them from my street, and if I walk briskly for 45 minutes I can enter them.
This means that even though BOC are one of my favourite bands, there is a nonzero chance that — without even realising it — I have stood next to one of them in a pub toilet, or shouted at one of them for doing a close pass on my bike, or accidentally thrown a frisbee at their family on the beach.
Sure enough, at the listening party people exchanged fragmented anecdotes about real-life connections. Someone in the queue said he knew someone who knew someone who knew one of them from the school run.
Another person revealed that he went to school with them, and had visited their recording studio about 15 years ago. He also claimed that he had some tapes of their early material, and a copy of their legendary self-released 1995 vinyl EP Twoism (limited to 100 copies) but that — I kid you not — the dog ate it.
All of that information was a bit much for one or two of the punters around him, who started begging him to rip the tapes and upload them to the internet. That was the end of the anecdotes from that particular person, although not before he also mentioned that he saw Boards of Canada performing live with Autechre in Edinburgh in 1997. Lucky guy!
There were also a couple of people who were rather too eager to make everyone aware that they’d been to the more formally organised listening event in Glasgow the week before, and that they had downloaded the files that had emerged online, and therefore they knew exactly what the album sounded like, and which bits to look out for.
Listening parties are a bit odd, especially if you are the sort of person who likes to be immersed in the music. The person just behind me in the queue seemed a bit anxious about the prospect of listening to Inferno in the presence of other people, revealing that listening to BOC had always been a solitary pursuit for him. An album isn’t a concert, and a bustling shop isn’t always the ideal way to hear an album for the first time.
Nevertheless, Mark Thorne, the record shop owner, is a great servant to his customers, and he likes to put on a good event. He ceremonially cleaned the stylus on the shop’s record player before finally dropping the needle.
First impressions
My first impressions of the album were positive. It sounded more varied, and perhaps even more playful, than I was expecting. Among the highlights from that first listen: The fun cut-up vocal samples in Father and Son. The syncopated beat of Naraka. The dissonant but beautiful drone running through Memory Death. The bleeping and blooping of All Reason Departs.
Even on that first compromised listen, surrounded by Edinburgh’s sweatiest, most introverted middle-aged men wearing exclusively black (I’m guilty as charged on all counts), there was already more to write home about in Inferno’s little finger than the whole of Tomorrow’s Harvest.
After the record finished, I collected my pre-ordered CD from the counter (I had already ordered the deluxe red vinyl from Bleep). Then I soaked everything in for a while as Music Has the Right to Children was spun as a coda to the evening’s events.
By the time I left the shop, it was well after midnight, and the album had been released on Spotify. So I listened back to the first few tracks on my way back home. And it took me a very long time to get to sleep after all that excitement.
Track by track
There is something to say about every track on this album. I covered the first two tracks — Introit and Prophecy at 1420 MHz — above.
Third track Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan starts out with an eerie, echoing synth chord that sounds like decay. Spooky drumming comes into play, backwards. After a few moments, an absolutely bad-ass synth bass comes in, sounding like a flat-bottomed stone skimming off a laser beam. Towards the end of the track some incomprehensible chanting can be heard, creating a sense of tension. This is a warped banger.
Then Age Of Capricorn stutters in, with a stretched-out sample of someone seemingly explaining the theory that Osama bin Laden had a status as the antichrist encoded into his name. As that sample repeats over and over, a televangelist starts talking about sin, while a crowd sings — apparently sampled from this “cosmic chant”. It feels like a bombardment of religious messages designed to persuade — simultaneously joyous and creepy.
As that fades away into the distance, it’s as if we are cinematically panning to a different part of the cosmos to witness Father And Son crank into action. This is the track that the Guardian took most exception to, for its jokey cut-up sampling of people talking about their faith.
It turns out that the majority of samples come from a 1971 BBC documentary about a religious cult. In this clip, a concerned father tries to reason with his estranged son, who has cut off contact to become part of the cult. This brings a more poignant meaning to the track title.
This is an immediate highlight of the album. It exhibits an energetic, hip-hop bounce we haven’t really heard from BOC since their first album, Music Has the Right to Children. It is also incredibly playful.
It sounds more like something Aphex Twin would come up with. But while Aphex Twin often doesn’t get much deeper than the superficial jokey sound, you sense that here BOC are using the humour as a story-telling device, or even a way of seeking meaning.
Somewhere Right Now In The Future is a more ethereal affair. Sonically it sounds like some of Brian Eno’s more recent ambient music. For example, it might fit on Eno’s album Small Craft on a Milk Sea. It feels emotionally ambiguous, with an uncertain direction.
People have spotted that, underneath the layers of instrumentation, you can faintly hear the sound of screeching wheels followed by an explosion — perhaps a car crash. Inferno’s artwork contains two images of a crashed car. Is there a meaning here to decode?
Then comes Naraka, which achieved instant legendary status on the message boards within a day of the album’s release. A pulsating foundation drives this track without dominating it. The main bassline has an infectious syncopated rhythm, supported by slightly off-key chimes. This combination reminds me of the Autechre track Second Peng.
The second half of this track features a Hare Krishna chant, sampled from a 1980s video promoting the movement. This also raised eyebrows from the Guardian.
But this group has been accused of being a cult, brainwashing, false imprisonment and child abuse (which the International Society of Krishna Consciousness itself has acknowledged). A theme to the album is emerging. It maps to the album artwork, which heavily features images of children with open eyes but no irises or pupils, seemingly signifying brainwashing.
Acts Of Magic is the musical low point of the album. It is aesthetically displeasing, primarily because the sound of buzzing flies is a major feature. But this feels crucial from a storytelling perspective. Part of this track was featured in the trailer, and it perhaps signifies the Inferno concept more strongly than any other track.
That lasts a little over a minute before Memory Death. A dissonant but poignant chord, of the sort Scott Walker was masterful at creating, is a constant drone-like backdrop throughout the track. A beautiful sequence of synth chords takes centre stage, partnered with a beeping that sounds like a heart monitor (albeit one recording an infeasibly slow heart rate).
Through the second half of the track, a beautiful ethereal voice comes in, as if summoning us to another realm. At the end of the track, the beeping ends, and a resolving synth chord fails to appear, leaving a solitary bass note reverberating to spine-tingling effect.
Memory Death is still fading out when The Word Becomes Flesh clunks and whirrs into life. The track has a mechanical, computer-like sound. Again we hear cut-up vocal samples, this time about the formation of an embryo. It’s a great track, and I particularly enjoy the very end where synth sounds mysteriously develop while the entire track fades out.
The fact that a track about death is followed by one about birth adds further to the sense that BOC are telling a story with this album. But it transpires that the embryo in question is a chicken embryo. Is there meaning in that, or just an oversight in the course of using an interesting-sounding sample?
Into The Magic Land is one of the more straightforward tracks on the album. Guitar plays a key role in this tune, and it is one of the few moments on the album to receive a lo-fi treatment. This track would have been at home on The Campfire Headphase, but at the same time it easily betters that entire album.
That is followed by the noir of Blood In The Labyrinth. A brooding intro features a heartbeat-like sound. Sitar plays a starring role in this track. Except for the Hare Krishna chants from earlier, it is perhaps the most upfront example of a new age aesthetic that can be detected throughout parts of Inferno.
The sitar, like the Hare Krishna chants, could have been a real cringe moment. But it makes so much sense in context, and it sounds superb.
The track features haunting speech samples from a 1979 documentary where rehabilitated addicts of a dissociative drug recounted disturbing experiences.
The track ends in a sea of distortion that ends abruptly when Deep Time begins. This was immediately familiar as the music from the Tape 05 teaser video. One of the album’s many highlights.
It crossfades into All Reason Departs, which begins with a sample of a passage written by Aleister Crowley, an occultist who was a precursor to new age ideologies. He declared himself to be the prophet of a “new aeon”.
Musically, parts of this feel like a sort of faded-out mirror image of Deep Time. But the whole thing is propelled by some wonderful keyboards, and a driving, urgent beat.
Halfway through come those bleeps that I took note of at the listening party. It’s a moody track, but at the same time a real toe-tapper — even a head-nodder.
The bleeping becomes increasingly wayward and acid-infused towards the end of the track. It’s a glorious section. It shows that for all the cinematic ambition and musical range of this album, at the same time BOC are still able to make their best electronic music as if they were still in their late 1990s pomp.
Next comes Arena Americanada, which sounds like a gleaming 1980s power tune. It is another that seemed to become a fan favourite. I’d love to know how that bass sound was made. It sounds like a big electric guitar string being hit with a hammer.
This, more than any other track, reflects a possible influence of VHS Head. You can also easily imagine it on a classic prog rock album.
Then comes The Process, which starts out as a disturbing cacophony — a sea of incomprehensible noise. After a while, a robotic-sounding female voice starts speaking, mostly inaudibly. The fragments of speech that can be made out seem to be meaningless babble.
Eventually, that fades out to reveal a reflective, sorrowful keyboard line while birdsong rings out above it. The track is only three minutes long, and musically there’s little to speak about until the third minute — but it is one of the most intense and emotional parts of the album.
The next track comes like a breath of fresh air. You Retreat In Time And Space is an instant BOC classic. This is the track that you could most easily imagine being part of Music Has the Right to Children.
It’s a masterstroke on several fronts. First of all, it’s just a plain great tune. But it also manages to sound like a classic BOC track without ever sounding cliched — something that even BOC have struggled to pull off since their path-finding debut. Even if the rest of Inferno was nothing special, this track alone could almost redeem all of their post-Geogaddi career.
Then the album ends with I Saw Through Platonia. It’s a beautiful track, with a synth that fades in and out like a tide gently swaying. Once again we hear a heartbeat. Then a static-sounding signal comes in, and the album comes to a close. Some people have likened the static noise to a carrier wave signal, a phenomenon reported by users of psychedelic drugs, and by those who have had near-death experiences.
The deluxe red vinyl edition of the record also contained an unadvertised surprise: a secret hexagonal flexi disc hidden inside the booklet. Vol.4 – P. Primers – 177 Giraud’s Mirror feels more like part of the lore than part of the album. It ties in more strongly to the promotional campaign than to the album’s music.
It is among the most haunted-sounding tracks BOC have ever made. It evokes a powerful mood — nostalgic, sorrowful, horrific, and beautiful all in the same breath.
Seeking meaning in Inferno
Boards of Canada fans love to dissect the music to understand if it has deeper meaning. Inferno certainly has many facets asking to be picked apart. But while in past the messages in BOC’s music have been hidden away deep in the mix, the vocals are a lot more upfront here than usual.
There are multiple clear references to religion, cults, new age mysticism, counterculture, psychedelics. These references are also present in the album’s artwork.
While the previews of the artwork seen in adverts ahead of the album’s release felt aesthetically displeasing or even naff, it works incredibly well in tandem with the music itself. This is like Radiohead’s album artwork. You wouldn’t necessarily want to hang it on your wall — but it plays a crucial role in creating the experience surrounding the whole album.
In addition to all those spiritual references, the albums also contains many references to — through inference or directly in track titles — to philosophy, science, metaphysics, physics and geology. These more rationalist approaches are sometimes seen as being in opposition to the more spiritual references.
But this album seems to draw parallels between those two broad schools. These are all ways humans try to make sense of reality, and what lies beyond what we perceive.
A struggle to understand what’s beyond our realm
The ideas explored in Prophecy At 1420 MHz and Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan suggest that the start of the album is also the start of the universe. With the big bang comes the formation of the first elements. But it is also the beginning of consciousness itself.
Age Of Capricorn and Father And Son exhibit cultish figureheads tightening their grip on these ideas. Here, powerful people seek to manipulate and even brainwash people, taking advantage of humanity’s need seek understanding and meaning.
In Father And Son in particular, there is a battle — not over the fundamental idea of the existence of God, but on how far to take that belief. The son has been taken in by a cult. The father is himself apparently religious, but more moderate, and seemingly less literate in theology than his son. As such, he does not have the sufficient tools to reason with his son.
The way Somewhere Right Now In The Future sounds could be interpreted as a sort of ending of that father–son relationship. This is a deeply sad-sounding tune, perhaps reflecting on the fact that the son has been lost to the cult.
But the track title implies it is more about the nature of time. The future is another version of the present.
The idea that you can faintly hear a car crashing in the background is also curious. There is a sense that this track has more meaning to be cracked.
Naraka is a type of hell in Indian religions. This concept might have been included by BOC as a way of avoiding accusations that they were singling out Christianity for criticism.
But I feel like the album is trying to draw the conclusion that humanity as a whole is compelled to understand what is beyond our realm. The idea of a hell is part of the story we tell ourselves to try and make that understanding.
This leads into Acts Of Magic, which really sounds like we are entering hell. Flies and birds can be heard. Perhaps some kind of outdoor ritual is taking place. Perhaps a death, or a coma of sorts, really did happen during Somewhere Right Now In The Future, with Naraka and Acts Of Magic signifying the journey to hell.
Memory Death seems to confirm the passing. Or is it the end of a life itself? Or a signal of a loss of self? Or a more literal reference to a loss of memory, or dementia?
Maybe the inclusion of the flies is a literal interpretation of a circle of life. Our bodies decompose, our elements rearrange, become part of nature and turn into different forms of life.
It’s curious that this track about death leads straight into The Word Becomes Flesh, containing the formation of an embryo. Is it about reincarnation or rebirth? Has our protagonist come back to life as a chicken? Or is it signalling an induction into a born again movement?
Musically, it also sounds a bit like a clock ticking, another connection to ideas of time.
As a whole, the second half of the album has a different feel to the first. The bulk of the overt references to religion come in the first half of the album. While religion is not entirely absent from the second half, there is a greater focus on new age movements and mind-altering drugs.
Even so, the themes in the second half feel a bit harder to read into. Into The Magic Land has no vocal samples to decode, just a reference in the track title to magic.
Nevertheless, I feel like this plays the same role as Age Of Capricorn. Just as Age Of Capricorn revolves around persuasive cult leaders spreading their message, Into The Magic Land represents a more mystical form of persuasion.
It is a gateway to Blood In The Labyrinth. The use of the sitar feels like a comment on new age movements’ co-option of eastern cultural and religious ideas as a way of spreading their messages and controlling their followers.
The samples feature psychedelic drug users discussing the effects of the drugs, turning them violent and causing a death in a swimming pool. By this stage, many themes are repeating throughout the album. This is arguably the second or even third death to take place.
Blood In The Labyrinth finishes in a sea of noise, perhaps as if we are the ones drowning in the swimming pool. This ends quite abruptly, when the next track, Deep Time, begins.
It positions itself as a new beginning, but the multilayered sonic nature of the track feels like it mimics the sort of rocks found in and around Edinburgh. Discoveries involving these rocks caused the geologist James Hutton to develop the concept of deep time.
This brings us back to the more rationalist, scientific view of the universe. Hutton’s 18th century findings demonstrated that the Earth is billions of years old — much older than the few thousand years that religions told people at the time.
Yet the concept of deep time still has a strong connection with the idea of inferno — an unbearably hot underworld. The process by which rocks are eroded, deposited and uplifted are caused by the Earth’s internal heat.
James Hutton’s ideas are also said to be a precursor to the anthropic principle — described by Wikipedia as:
the proposition that the range of possible observations that could be made about the universe is limited by the fact that observations are only possible in the type of universe that is capable of developing observers in the first place.
All Reason Departs returns us to new age and magic, starting with a quote from an occultist that sounds like it is being received through a shortwave radio. This feels like another echo of the broadcast in Prophecy At 1420 MHz, but perhaps also of the modes of persuasion used in Age Of Capricorn.
The bleeping and wayward squelchy synths — along with the track’s title — also feel like an echo of Father And Son, where the son had lost all reason after being taken in by a cult.
It’s unclear whether Arena Americanada is supposed to be a portmanteau of America and Canada (perhaps a comment on recent political events?), or if it’s “America-nada”, as in nothing. The word arena derives from the Latin for sand, which perhaps makes a connection with the geological formations in Deep Time. But the sand that arena is named after is a specific kind used to absorb blood in gladiator fights. Is this a connection to Blood In The Labyrinth?
The Process feels like a conceptual echo of Acts Of Magic and Memory Death, bringing another sense that the same story is somehow being repeated in different ways; retold from multiple perspectives. The chaotic beginning pf the track almost feels like an internal struggle. The more contemplative second half sounds like resignation.
Many have interpreted You Retreat In Time And Space as a sort of escape from all the intensity of the album. It feels like a real breath of fresh air — a release of sorts. Perhaps it is an escape from the inferno.
Following on from The Process, it’s possible that the protagonist has decided to stop resisting. They are choosing to transcend, and to bathe in spirituality. This is a moment of peace.
It has also been noted that this track shares musical properties with Deep Time. Indeed, you can arguably hear echoes of Deep Time in every track that follows it.
The final track, I Saw Through Platonia has a heartbeat running through it. This heartbeat stops as the carrier wave sound starts to take precedence. Then several seconds of silence brings the album to a close.
Comparison is invited to the heart monitor beeps from Memory Death that end just before that track finishes.
The cosmos and the individual
Upon reaching the end of the album, my first impression of its meaning was that the first half tells a story from the point of view of the cosmos, its messengers and other external observers (such as the father in Father And Son, and the heartbeat monitor). The second half tells the same story, but from the perspective of the individual, signified by the actual heartbeat sounds.
But repeated listens belie this simplistic initial interpretation.
For one, the end of Memory Death happens only 29 minutes into the 70 minute long album, suggesting that this is not a simple story of two halves. And interesting connections can be made across the album in all sorts of directions. There is more going on.
Backwards in time
It seems plausible that parts of this record may make sense backwards. That would be absolutely par for the course for Boards of Canada. The backwards drums in Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan, and I Saw Through Platonia’s forwards-then-backwards church bells invite you to try the album out in reverse — although I have not yet done this.
Reincarnation and entering other realms
There are a few points where reincarnation, or some kind of cyclical view of nature plays a role. Memory Death followed by The Word Becomes Flesh is an obvious one.
I’m also struck by the idea that the carrier wave sound at the end of the album may be designed to mimic the sound experienced by users of psychedelic drugs just before they enter a mind-altering state. It is also said to have been experienced by some who have had a near-death experience. Paired with the ending of the heartbeat, does it signal a transition to a new life in a different realm?
I almost think you could listen to this album on repeat and discover a new reading, possibly one where the individual is reincarnated as ultimate consciousness itself. However, the several seconds of silence at the end of the album suggest otherwise.
Potential palindromic structure
A part of the tracklisting seems like it may have a palindromic structure, as BOC said that Tomorrows Harvest had. This palindromic structure would indeed revolve around Memory Death and The Word Becomes Flesh.
Either side of that centrepiece are two tracks containing the word Magic. Then comes Naraka paired with Blood In The Labyrinth, the two tracks sharing the most overt eastern imagery.
Then comes Somewhere Right Now In The Future paired with Deep Time. There is an obvious connection there in the treatment of time, and the idea that you can see the past in the present and the future.
Then comes Father And Son paired with All Reason Departs. A connection there is also clear.
Any purpose behind a pairing of Age Of Capricorn with Arena Americanada seems less clear. After this point the idea of a palindromic structure seems to break down to me. But maybe others can make clearer connections.
Kübler-Ross grief model
A specific section near the start of album seems to me to follow the Kübler-Ross grief model. This was originally developed as a way of understanding how people process grief, but it is now used to understand our reactions to any type of major life change.
- Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan — denial
- Age Of Capricorn — anger
- Father And Son — bargaining
- Somewhere Right Now In The Future — depression
- Naraka — acceptance
Family conflict
Family is another apparent theme of the album. Some of the imagery associated with the album includes a silhouette of a family with two adults and four children. It is an update of an image used for Geogaddi, which contained a “nuclear family” of two adults and two children.
Father And Son is an obvious focal point around family conflict. I also wondered if Memory Death, leading into The Word Becomes Flesh was about the decision every new parent needs to make — to sacrifice a part of themselves and their identity in order to take on the all-consuming role of becoming parent.
There is also an intriguing subplot, where the credits for the album more clearly delineate the roles of the brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin who make up Boards of Canada. The credits make it clear that Mike Sandison has contributed much more heavily to this album. Did something happen that helps explain the 13 year wait since their last album?
I won’t dwell on the implications more, because it’s not really much of our business as fans. There may be an innocuous explanation for this. It has been implied in the past that Mike Sandison has always been the creative driving force. But it feels odd for them be so explicit about their roles on this album, when they have historically been so secretive. Given the reputation of BOC fans, it almost begs to be read into.
It has been noted by some that Vol.4 – P. Primers – 177 Giraud’s Mirror contains a sample saying: “The greatest gift is the smile you give to your brother.”
Artificial intelligence
It is also tempting to consider if parts of this album are about artificial intelligence. The second half of the album in particular contains a lot of computer-like sounds and cut-up vocals. The cacophonous gibberish in The Process feels like a reference to AI hallucinations — the way they just produce words without any understanding of their true meaning.
The reference to deep time and its connection to the anthropic principle could even be about artificial intelligence.
Back to space and time
But I am compelled by the frequent references to space and time.
There is perhaps another clue in the reference to Platonia at the end. Platonia is the idea that we are in a timeless realm that contains every possible configuration of the universe.
This may explain why some stories are retold repeatedly, and why some musical themes seem to subtly echo in different configurations throughout the album. The same elements end up in different configurations, in different realms, at different times.
From this perspective, Deep Time is a microcosm of the album’s concept, told from the rationalist enlightenment’s point of view. James Hutton was able to prove his theory because he could literally see the unconformity — multiple different rock masses from different eras appearing in the same place.
This is a literal example of the same elements being reconfigured across time. It is an echo of the past appearing in our present, and sure to echo in a different way in the far future.
I am compelled to draw a connection between apparent themes of reincarnation across realms. The same events happening in different ways in different universes.
Cults control their followers by reminding them of the possibility that in the next life, they may be sent to hell.
The idea of Platonia suggests not only that we may be sent to hell. It says that somewhere right now, in an almost infinite number of possible configurations of the universe, we are in an almost infinite number of hells all at once.
Listening to this album and considering what it might mean reminds me of lying on the grass, staring into a mostly empty night sky and feeling dizzy from the fact that there is nothing between me and the edge of the universe.
I feel like this album is about humanity’s compulsion to understand what is beyond our realm — and our ultimate failure to do so.
For all our scientific advances, for all that James Hutton’s deep time disproved some religious ideas hundreds of years ago, we are no closer to resolving our deepest questions. What is the meaning of life? What lies beyond the universe? What happened before time began? What happens after we die?
Infer no meaning
I have seen one or two people joke that the meaning of Inferno is that we should infer no meaning from it. There may be something in this. It is as if this album is meant to have multiple potential readings, and none at all, all at the same time. A platonia of meanings.
The album certainly asks the questions throughout. But at the end of Inferno, it is as if a decision is made to stop engaging with the questions. You Retreat In Time And Space is just a great hippy tune.
I Saw Through Platonia brings us back down to reality. Having considered all those greatest questions that we face, almost everything else fades away as we are left to consider our own heartbeat as the thing that matters the most.
A towering musical achievement
Whatever Inferno does or does not mean, there is an inescapable feeling that this is a deeply meaningful album to BOC themselves. 13 years is a long time between albums. Both brothers are now old enough for a lot of life to have happened to them.
What astonishes me most of all is just how great this album sounds. Even if there was no deep meaning to unlock, this music runs the full range of human emotions. From funny to sad, scary to contemplative. It is a cliche to say it, but this album is unmistakably a journey.
I’ve heard people compare this album to Dark Side of the Moon. Maybe it’s the inclusion of heartbeats and the interrogation of time. But I think the comparison is merited.
The musical range is just as vast as the emotional range. We have gone way beyond warbling synths, nostalgia-tinged techno and the odd bit of shoegaze guitar.
Yes, Inferno contains some of the best electronic music BOC have made. But it also augments that with a world full of musical possibility — guitar, sitar, harp, incredible live drums, percussion and more. The sound palette of the album is diverse yet thoroughly cohesive.
That is perhaps the greatest achievement of Inferno. It sounds unmistakably like Boards of Canada. But at the same time, it brings so much more that we never knew they could achieve, both musically and emotionally.
Deeper liminality
This is Boards of Canada but deeper. They have always been masters at musically conveying liminality. Their music has always played with the idea that things we consider to be opposites actually share most of their properties, giving rise to slippages.
Their music has always said: There is no light without darkness. There is no hope without fear. There is no future without the past. There is no adulthood without childhood.
BOC have always played with these ideas, flitting around the equilibrium of those opposite states like the wow and flutter of a degraded tape.
This has always given BOC’s music a unique emotional resonance. It taps into a deep feeling we have inside ourselves.
It brings up complex memories and feelings from our childhoods. It reminds us of the gradual realisation that the world we were brought into is much more ambiguous — and even dangerous — than we were brought up to believe.
Many themes of Inferno are familiar from BOC’s past material, at least on a superficial level. References to new age culture and religious cults were a major part of their early output.
But in the past, that was always more about borrowing the aesthetics of those concepts, rather than considering them at deeper level. Any meaning to be derived from it was ambiguous.
They were just a building blocks in the construction of their hauntology. The main message seemed to be: “wasn’t all that stuff from the 1970s a bit unsettling?”
On science, too, they are going deeper. BOC have always peppered their music with references to mathematics. Numerology has been the throughline to the new age and religious references.
But Inferno moves all the way along the scientific purity spectrum. They have advanced from focusing mainly on maths to considering not only physics, but also chemistry, geology, biology, and arguably even psychology and sociology as well.
What makes Inferno so powerful is the way it wraps those big questions about time and space into questions about ourselves — as humanity, as social groups, and as individuals.
It is our entire reality interrogated at all zoom levels. It is like a non-linear, multilayered version of the Charles and Ray Eames film Powers of Ten.
Boards of Canada are no longer dealing just with the aesthetics of concepts. They are truly working with the meaning of them.
Take the way Deep Time seems to echo in unconventional ways throughout the last few tracks on the album, almost as a musical version of an unconformity. There are potentially other examples across the album. I am sure, for example, that somewhere deep in the mix of Naraka you can hear part of The Process.
It would be expected for BOC to do this for an aesthetic reason, as if mimicking the tendency of recorded-over tapes to retain ghosts of their previous recordings — or a double exposure photograph. But by drawing a connection between this aesthetic and fundamental concepts of both religion and science brings so much more depth to the music.
Their music is now saying: There is no heaven without hell. There is no yang without yin. There is no belief without disbelief. There is no time without timelessness. There is no reality without unreality. Your birth begins the countdown to your death, and your death leads to a rebirth. The beginning of the universe is also the beginning of its end.
There is no new Boards of Canada album without first believing there will be no new Boards of Canada album.
Inferno as a Boards of Canada great
In the two weeks since I first heard Inferno, I have gone from hoping it wouldn’t be their worst album, to considering it to be among their top three, to thinking of it as easily their best album, to wondering if it is one of the best albums I have ever heard.
Inferno makes Music Has the Right to Children seem one-dimensional and samey (it was actually innovative and highly influential).
Inferno makes Geogaddi seem like plasticky juvenilia (it’s actually a mind-bending creative juggernaut).
Inferno makes The Campfire Headphase sound like music you’d hear on an advert for a bank (OK, this one is probably true).
Inferno makes Tomorrow’s Harvest feel flat as a pancake, both sonically and thematically (this one is definitely true).
That might be hyperbolic. It is hard to know just two weeks in how I’ll truly feel about this album in the long term. But just a few months ago, even imagining any new Boards of Canada album was a worthless pursuit.
Even upon knowing a new album was on its way, anticipating that it might be as good as their first two albums would have felt delusional.
By these barometers, Inferno is a real triumph.
What makes a great album for me
For the past 25 years, my two favourite albums have been Confield by Autechre, and Kid A by Radiohead. I have always been keenly aware that those albums were released within months of each other, and I happened to be 15 years old when I first heard them both. We just have a tendency to stick by music that we liked as teenagers.
But I rationalised these choices by considering Confield and Kid A as great artistic achievements that demonstrated advances in the artists’ sounds that would be unattainable by their followers.
Both Autechre and Radiohead had many copycats chasing their sound (indeed, Radiohead were chasing Autechre and Boards of Canada among others when they made Kid A). But Confield and Kid A were both moments where those artists were able to step things right up a level, as if to say to their peers: “Just you try to copy this”.
Both groups had already made great albums. Autechre had Amber and Tri Repetae under their belts, defining experimental techno for the 1990s. Radiohead had made The Bends and OK Computer, two era-defining alternative rock albums.
But they transcended these already great achievements by producing something that their followers could never hope to mimic. This made Confield and Kid A the greatest albums for me.
Boards of Canada had their two great albums. But they never achieved that next-level album. Instead, they seemingly struggled — for decades — to respond to the deluge of copycats.
No one was really making nostalgic electronic music until Boards of Canada started it in the mid-1990s. Before then, electronic music was almost always about the future.
When Boards of Canada took a 1990s attitude and mixed it with a 1970s aesthetic, they quite literally changed the course of electronic music.
But even Boards of Canada struggled to take things beyond their original ideas. Even parts of their second album Geogaddi risked becoming self-parody at points (although it did save itself with its deep creativity and intensity). Since then, their output has become disturbingly infrequent.
That fact alone was to the detriment of Boards of Canada’s achievements. To compare their productivity to another electronic duo from a similar era, Autechre had released over 17 hours of studio material between BOC releasing Tomorrow’s Harvest and Inferno. That figure balloons to 76 hours if you include all the live sets they have digitally released.
This is what made my hopes for Inferno so low. But it is also what makes me so in awe of what they have actually achieved with Inferno.
Making it worth the wait
It is hard to know if it is deeply unimpressive that it has taken Boards of Canada this long to release a new album, or if it is deeply impressive that they have produced such a towering achievement out of almost nowhere.
(Perhaps there is no impressiveness without unimpressiveness.)
After all, when Autechre made Confield and Radiohead made Kid A, they were still striking while the iron was relatively hot. They were both just a few years on from their previous albums, still playing live, still testing out new ideas with crowds.
Boards of Canada have not played live in a quarter of a century. They have been working on their new material more-or-less in complete privacy, with no feedback from their fanbase.
I’m struggling to think of a parallel. My Bloody Valentine’s M B V emerged after a 22 year gestation period. But while it was quite good, it didn’t come close to matching their 1991 album Loveless.
Portishead’s Third was pretty good after an 11 year wait. But all the members of that band were still highly active in other projects in the interim.
The closest example I can think of in terms of an album that was unexpectedly excellent is David Bowie’s Blackstar. Arguably, that was his best effort for nearly 40 years. But even Blackstar didn’t just appear out of nowhere — it required Bowie to make The Next Day first.
Confident risk-taking
Most impressively of all, Infeno is such a brave album to have made, both musically and conceptually. It is incredibly ambitious — even risky.
Making what amounts of a concept album about humanity’s relationship with belief, space, time and interdimensionality risked accusations of pretension.
Expanding the musical palette beyond warbling synths and crunchy beats wasn’t guaranteed to be successful (arguably the introduction of guitars backfired on The Campfire Headphase). The sitar and the Hare Krishna chants are a terrible idea on paper.
But it all just makes so much sense in the context of this album. It all works so well. With Inferno, they have taken many risks, and pulled every single one of them off.
The production quality is also of note. I’m not a production expert, but I have seen many positive remarks on this front.
I do like music to sound well made and with attention to detail. I really noticed how incredible Inferno sounds. I felt like I could tell how much attention had been given to some of the details. It sounds wonderful on headphones.
It feels like BOC really knew they were making a brilliant album, and pulled out all the stops to make it as brilliant as possible.
Despite the risky nature of the album’s theme, and despite the ambitious nature of the music, and despite the lack of feedback from fans, they have delivered confidently and hit the bullseye.
So now we can say it. Yes, Boards of Canada had made Music Has the Right to Children and Geogaddi, two albums that changed the shape of electronic music. But they have now transcended those already great achievements by producing something that their followers could never hope to mimic. At last, they are able to say: “Just you try to copy this.”
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