Boards Of Canada Share ‘Introit’ and ‘Prophecy At 1420 MHz’ From Comeback Album ‘Inferno’

Boards Of Canada have finally released new music from their comeback album Inferno, and the first taste is as eerie and elusive as fans would hope. The Scottish electronic duo have shared the opening pair of tracks, Introit and Prophecy At 1420 MHz, ahead of the record’s May 29 release via Warp.

The album is set to arrive as an 18-track follow-up to 2013’s Tomorrow’s Harvest, and will be issued across multiple physical formats as well as digitally. Pre-order and pre-save options are already live here.

Introit works like a fogged-up doorway into the record, all spectral, retro-futurist synth fragments and uneasy motion. Prophecy At 1420 MHz pushes things further, slowly gathering into a hypnotic, slightly ominous head-nodder. Its title points to the deep-space frequency used in the search for extra-terrestrial life, while muffled, altered vocals seem to surface from the static around it.

Both tracks can be heard in a video directed by Robert Beatty.

The return had already been telegraphed through a poster campaign that turned heads in London, New York, California, and Shibuya. The designs echoed the artwork from their 1998 debut Music Has The Right To Children, which was enough to send speculation swirling long before anything official landed.

Boards of Canada have been mostly quiet in the 13 years since Tomorrow’s Harvest, but there have been occasional signs that they were still out there: random remixes, archival reissues, and an NTS DJ mix among them.

One especially telling clue came when a fan dug up a website the duo had previously used to seed hints about their activity. It had been revived with a terse message: “nobody home…” followed by the same phrase repeated in Morse code, “ /// -. — -… — -.. -.– / …. — — . .-.-.- .-.-.- .-.-.-“.

Fans later began posting online about VHS tapes arriving with Boards of Canada’s hexagon-mesh logo on them. According to the archivist page BoC Pages, those tapes included audio for an ad promoting a Christian bible school magazine that stopped publishing in 1991.

Tomorrow’s Harvest earned four stars in an NME review back in 2013, where the band were dubbed the “anti-Daft Punk”. The review went on to note that while the Parisian robot duo’s Random Access Memories leaned into “sunshine, light and high-profile collaborations,” Boards of Canada’s album was “a dark, often uncomfortable affair, more nuclear winter than summer anthem.”