Inferno

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.