After a 13-year radio silence, of course, the first question on many minds will be, What’s changed? The answer remains, as usual: not much. The duo has not significantly altered its formula since Music Has the Right to Children, though that’s not to say its discography has delivered diminishing returns; one of Boards of Canada’s talents has always been the ability to eke out subtle variations from a relatively fixed pool of sounds and moods. Geogaddi doubled down on Music Has the Right to Children’s mix of lacerating hip-hop beats and woozy psychedelia; flush with acoustic guitars, 2005’s The Campfire Headphase carved out space for pastoral contemplation; things turned darker and muggier with 2013’s drone-heavy Tomorrow’s Harvest, their last album until now. Darkness once again shades Inferno, but the shift this time has more to do with heft and texture: The album’s palette is distinguished by its sharp lines, ultra-vivid detailing, generous dynamic range, and crisply tactile feel, especially in the rhythm tracks. If Tomorrow’s Harvest was influenced by soundtrack composers like Wendy Carlos and Mark Isham, Inferno suggests a 3D projection on the biggest screen in town, with richer colors and more dizzying spatialization than anything they’ve done before.
Inferno opens as Boards of Canada albums so often do, with a cluster of brassy, vaguely optimistic synths, a dead ringer for the sorts of abstract jingles once encountered alongside the introductory credits on VHS tapes; barely a minute later, things leap into action with “Prophecy at 1420 MHz,” whose chiseled rock beat, evolving synthscapes, and plangent guitar lead feel like the platonic ideal of a Boards of Canada song, blown up to gargantuan proportions. The title is a reference to the frequency at which hydrogen resonates, believed to be a likely signal path for interstellar communication; as the track gathers steam, a robotic voice delivers a gravelly treatise on consciousness and being: “Nothingness comes to a greater awareness of itself/The divine intellect/I am the truth, extinction… I am God, the ultimate resonance.” It’s a high-stakes bid to claim ownership of the oldest story in the book: the meaning of life.
That story appears in fragments across the album; sleuths will have a field day scouring the record for its copious Easter eggs. Over pistoning Steve Reich pianos, “Age of Capricorn” begins with a computerized voice spelling out coded references to the Antichrist (and Osama bin Laden) before a Christian prayer is intoned against a swelling choral backdrop. In “Father and Son,” the dialogue from what sounds like Ned Flanders’ favorite evangelical radio broadcast is cut up and rhythmically synced to an almost deliriously funky, quintessentially Boards-in-B-boy-mode groove. Another choppy voiceover is the centerpiece of the Geogaddi-esque crunch of “The Word Becomes Flesh,” this time a chipper educational spiel about human embryos, the kind of thing you might encounter in a middle-school sex ed class. At first, these highly specific voiceovers, with their Books-like rhythmic tics, feel jarring, but after enough repetitions, it would be hard to imagine the music without them; they function as portals you can’t quite unlock, or puzzle pieces you keep spinning in your mind.
