Scottish duo, Boards of Canada, have announced their fifth studio album ‘Inferno’. The album will drop on the 29th of May featuring 18 new songs. This will be BoC’s first album in 13 years succeeding ‘Tomorrow’s Harvest’ which came out in 2013. Since 2013 there has been little to no activity from the pair, having only released 3 singles which were remixes of ‘Treat Em Right’, ‘Good Friday’, and ‘Mr Mistake’.
Brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin released their first album ‘Music Has The Right To Children’ back in 1998, featuring one of their biggest songs to date ‘Roygbiv’. Here BoC introduced the world to their electronic style, or more specifically, IDM- intelligent dance music. Many describe the duos sound as psychedelic or futuristic for its unique vibrations, often accompanied by emotive videos.
BoC has been known to do cryptic campaigns to tease their music and this time they didn’t hold back. Back in 2013 the duo used a website to obscurely promote their album ‘Tomorrow’s Harvest’. This same website had become active again with a simple message noting “nobody home…” dating back to a year ago. However, anticipation for a new album arose when fans were sent mysterious VHS tapes marked with a hexagon sun logo in early April. For fans who had access to a VHS player, they reported that the audio was warped over a glitchy video. As the tapes were mailed, many traced the senders address back to locations linked to Warp Records and distributor Bleep, who BoC have previously worked with. As well as this, posters including the hexagon sun logo began popping up all over London, California, Japan and New York.
The clues didn’t stop there as the duo released a teaser video only a week ago on the 16th of April. ‘Tape 05’ can be viewed on YouTube, containing distorted audio and visuals similar to those of the VHS tapes. While some speculate that ‘Tape 05’ is track 5 of the album, named ‘Father And Son’, some also question whether it even belongs to the album. Additionally, a preview can also be seen on YouTube confirming their album release with indistinct and dystopian imagery.
Intrigue surrounding the pair is not from the marketing tactics alone. BoC have never gone on tour, having only played a minority of live shows which was over two decades ago. Rarely doing interviews or performing gigs makes this announcement a rare one, especially after their 13 year break.
‘Inferno’ will be available to the public in just over a month and will be ready to stream on all major platforms, or can be pre-saved now.
