Boards of Canada Came Back After 13 Years to Scare You. 'Inferno' Was Worth the Wait.

Thirteen years. That is how long Boards of Canada left the room empty after Tomorrow's Harvest in 2013, long enough that most people quietly filed Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin under "not coming back." Inferno landed on Warp on May 29, and the first thing to say about it is that the wait did not soften them. This is the darkest, most physical record the Scottish duo has made.

It opens the way their records always open, with a sound. Exclaim! caught that the first track reuses a tone from "Happy Cycling," the closer on Music Has the Right to Children from 1998, the kind of buried self-reference BoC fans live for. The comfort does not last. By the second track, "Prophecy at 1420 MHz," there are live drums and a guitar in the mix, and a sampled voice (the Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr) booming "I am God, the ultimate resonance." Boards of Canada records used to sound like they were recorded underwater. This one has edges.

That shift is the whole album. For most of their run the duo dealt in what one critic called an amniotic-fluid quality, warm and blurred and homesick for a childhood that never quite happened. Inferno trades a lot of that for something tense and clipped. "Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan" rides heavy synths. "Arena Americanada" snaps back to the brittle IDM of their early EPs. "Into the Magic Land" goes full post-rock, nearer to Mogwai than to anything on Geogaddi. "Deep Time," the track they teased a year out as the mysterious "Tape 05," brings in strings and timpani and swells into the biggest thing they have ever put to tape.

The other shift is what they are sampling. BoC always cut up old educational films and half-heard voices, but Inferno is soaked in religion. A Christian sermon on "Age of Capricorn." Hare Krishna chanting on "Naraka." A scrap of the 1971 film The Jesus Trip on "Father and Son," a man telling his father he loves the Lord more than any physical being. Aleister Crowley turns up on "All Reason Departs." Mojo reached for Brian Eno and David Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and that is the right reference. The voices are not decoration here. They carry the argument. "The Word Becomes Flesh," built around a woman calmly walking through how an embryo develops, ended up scoring the end credits of A24's Backrooms, which opened the same day the album dropped.

The part nobody planned

The day before release, the White House posted a video to its social accounts set to a chunk of "Deep Time," cut against nationalist imagery: helicopters, the building itself, a Border Patrol boat, detention centers, flags. Public reaction ran heavily negative, and Warp issued a statement calling the use unauthorized and saying neither the label nor the duo "condone the unauthorised use of their music for political messaging." It was a strange prologue to a record that is, on its own terms, about the end of the world. Boards of Canada have never been activists and did not ask for the fight. The music does not lean on it either.

Because here is the take. Inferno is very good and it is not flawless. The first half, the half thick with voices, is where the record earns its reputation. The back stretch drifts. Once the samples thin out and the synths take the wheel, two or three tracks settle into a zoned-out summer haze that sounds like older Boards of Canada borrowing the new album's coat. The Guardian, the loudest holdout, called the whole thing stuck in the past, and on those weaker cuts you can hear what they mean. The catch is that they sit surrounded by the most alert, present music the duo has made in twenty years.

Most bands that vanish for thirteen years come back to remind you why you loved them. Boards of Canada came back to unsettle you. On a record about faith, catastrophe, and a world that has stopped explaining itself, that is the correct instinct. Metacritic has it at 84, with Pitchfork at 8.6 and Uncut and Clash both at 9, the dissents in the minority. Put it on after dark. It was built for that.