Inferno

The Roast

“Thirteen years. Thirteen years of decoding hexagons, of grown adults treating a Warp press release like the Zapruder film, of forum archaeologists insisting every silence from Hexagon Sun was itself a statement. Boards of Canada became less a band than a weather system you waited for. So Inferno arrives carrying a mythology no album could survive intact, and the Sandison brothers, to their credit, do not even try to feed it. The number stations and sun-bleached childhoods are mostly gone. In their place: guitars, live drums, sampled voices muttering about scripture and ruin, eighteen tracks of hauntology that has stopped haunting the past and started haunting the present. It is their darkest record, and also their most literal, which is the problem. When Geogaddi hid the devil in the math, you leaned in. When Inferno names him in the title and underlines the apocalypse for seventy minutes, you occasionally check your watch. The middle third sags under its own portent, ambient passages that feel less composed than curated, dread as wallpaper. And yet the craft is undeniable, the detuned melodies still hit that specific bruise nobody else can find. The mythos promised revelation. The record delivers a very good Boards of Canada album, slightly overlong, slightly over-explained, made by two men who heard the world finally catch up to their paranoia and decided to stop whispering.”

The Bright Side

When it connects, it genuinely connects. The decision to record live drums and guitar at Hexagon Sun gives the duo a physicality they have never had on record, and the best tracks fuse that warmth with real menace instead of nostalgia. Thirteen years did not dull the melodic instinct: those queasy, detuned hooks still bypass the brain and land somewhere in childhood memory. And refusing to remake Music Has the Right to Children, choosing the present-tense dread of AI and collapse over comfortable retro fog, is the bravest move two famously cautious Scots have ever made. The wait produced an album that inhabits 2026 rather than hiding from it.

Hardest Sneer

“Thirteen years of silence and the big reveal is that the apocalypse sounds like Boards of Canada with a Bible and a longer runtime. The mythos wrote checks the tracklist takes seventy minutes to almost cash.”

Issues (3)