Boards Of Canada Return With Inferno After 13 Years
Boards of Canada are back with Inferno, their fifth LP, and the new album arrives after a 13-year gap since Tomorrow's Harvest. For a duo long defined by scarcity, the move turns months of fan decoding into a concrete release on Warp Records.
Seven Hexagons In April
In early April 2026, a handful of people received a mysterious VHS tape marked with a pattern of seven hexagons, with degraded visuals and audio inside. Several days later, posters in garish reds and blues appeared across London, New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo, carrying the same shape in their corners, and listeners quickly read the trail as a sign that the Scottish electronic duo were close to returning.
Warp Records later announced the imminent arrival of Inferno, and the campaign kept feeding the same conclusion. A teaser video titled Tape 05 was later identified as the album cut Deep Time, before Introit and Prophecy At 1420 MHz followed as preview tracks.
Mike Sandison And Marcus Eoin
Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin have spent years building a catalogue wrapped in cryptic imagery, religious cults, numerology, nostalgia and the apocalypse, which is why this rollout feels less like a standard album announcement than a carefully staged return. The pairing has been described as endlessly influential and widely mythologised, and the new LP lands with that reputation fully intact.
That history stretches back to 1987, when the first known release credited to Boards of Canada was Catalog 3, a super limited cassette tape issued via their Music70 label. Earlier releases such as Acid Memories, Play By Numbers and Hooper Bay were only ever given out to friends and family members in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which left the duo with a catalog that was always more discussed than easy to find.
Deep Time And Prophecy At 1420 MHz
The three preview tracks point to familiar territory: wavering tape loops, crunching downtempo drums, synth melodies and samples, with Prophecy At 1420 MHz carrying a prominent robotic vocal. Those details suggest the album is not arriving as a reinvention, but as a continuation of the same sealed-off world listeners have chased for years.
For long-time listeners, the practical takeaway is simple: Inferno is no longer a rumor built from posters and tapes, but a fifth LP now headed for release on Warp Records. The 13-year wait ends with a record that already has a paper trail, three preview tracks and enough coded imagery to keep the duo’s fan communities busy well past launch day.
