{"id":700920,"date":"2026-05-29T05:53:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T05:53:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/700920\/"},"modified":"2026-05-29T05:53:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T05:53:08","slug":"boards-of-canada-inferno-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/700920\/","title":{"rendered":"Boards of Canada: Inferno Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

After a 13-year radio silence, of course, the first question on many minds will be, What\u2019s 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\u2019s not to say its discography has delivered diminishing returns; one of Boards of Canada\u2019s 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\u2019s mix of lacerating hip-hop beats and woozy psychedelia; flush with acoustic guitars, 2005\u2019s The Campfire Headphase<\/a> carved out space for pastoral contemplation; things turned darker and muggier with 2013\u2019s drone-heavy Tomorrow\u2019s Harvest<\/a>, 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\u2019s palette is distinguished by its sharp lines, ultra-vivid detailing, generous dynamic range, and crisply tactile feel, especially in the rhythm tracks. If Tomorrow\u2019s Harvest was influenced by soundtrack composers like Wendy Carlos<\/a> and Mark Isham, Inferno suggests a 3D projection on the biggest screen in town, with richer colors and more dizzying spatialization than anything they\u2019ve done before.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cProphecy at 1420 MHz,\u201d 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: \u201cNothingness comes to a greater awareness of itself\/The divine intellect\/I am the truth, extinction\u2026 I am God, the ultimate resonance.\u201d It\u2019s a high-stakes bid to claim ownership of the oldest story in the book: the meaning of life.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cAge of Capricorn\u201d begins with a computerized voice spelling out coded references<\/a> to the Antichrist (and Osama bin Laden) before a Christian prayer is intoned against a swelling choral backdrop. In \u201cFather and Son,\u201d the dialogue from what sounds like Ned Flanders\u2019 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 \u201cThe Word Becomes Flesh,\u201d 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<\/a>-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\u2019t quite unlock, or puzzle pieces you keep spinning in your mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After a 13-year radio silence, of course, the first question on many minds will be, What\u2019s changed? The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":700921,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[342,49,48,75,343],"class_list":["post-700920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-albums","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=700920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700920\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/700921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=700920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=700920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=700920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}