Boards Of Canada have released the first music from their comeback album ‘Inferno’ – check out ‘Introit’ and ‘Prophecy At 1420 MHz’ below.
The Scottish electronic duo are preparing to release their fifth studio album on May 29 via Warp, an 18-track follow-up to 2013’s ‘Tomorrow’s Harvest’. It is being released in multiple physical formats, as well as on digital, and you can pre-order/pre-save your copy here.
Now, they have shared the record’s opening two tracks, ‘Introit’ and ‘Prophecy At 1420 MHz’. The former acts as a mysterious prelude, with spectral, retro-futurist scrambling synths, while the latter is a hypnotic, slowly-building and mildly ominous head-nodder named after the deep space frequency used in the search for extra-terrestrial life, with muffled, mutated vocals seemingly emerging from the static.
Check out the video for the two tracks, directed by Robert Beatty, here:
News of BoC’s return emerged by way of a poster campaign featuring designs similar to the artwork of their classic 1998 debut album ‘Music Has The Right To Children’, spotted by fans around London, New York, California, and Shibuya.
The band have displayed brief signs of activity in the 13 years since their last album came out, in the form of random remixes, archival reissues, and an NTS DJ mix.
Another sign of life came when a Boards of Canada fan worked out that a website once used to plant clues to their activity had been revived with the following message: “nobody home…” and then a repetition of that phrase in Morse code – ” /// -. — -… — -.. -.– / …. — — . .-.-.- .-.-.- .-.-.-“.
Fans also began reporting online that they had been receiving VHS tapes bearing Boards of Canada’s hexagon-mesh logo. According to archivist page BoC Pages, the tapes contained audio for an ad for a Christian bible school magazine that stopped publishing in 1991.
‘Tomorrow’s Harvest scored four stars in an NME review in 2013, which described the band as the “anti-Daft Punk“.
It added: “While the Parisian robot duo’s ‘Random Access Memories’ is full of sunshine, light and high-profile collaborations, ‘Tomorrow’s Harvest’ is a dark, often uncomfortable affair, more nuclear winter than summer anthem.”