Boards of Canada break their silence with eerie double A-side ‘Introit’ and ‘Prophecy At 1420 MHz’

Boards of Canada have finally put new music into the world, sharing the first tracks from their comeback album Inferno: ‘Introit’ and ‘Prophecy At 1420 MHz’. After years of near-total silence, the Scottish duo are back with a release that feels, appropriately, like a signal emerging from somewhere half-remembered and difficult to pin down.

The new album arrives on May 29 via Warp and marks their fifth studio record, an 18-track follow-up to 2013’s Tomorrow’s Harvest. It will be available in multiple physical formats as well as digitally, with pre-order and pre-save options now live here.

The two opening cuts set the tone for how Boards of Canada want this return to register. ‘Introit’ plays like a murky prelude, all spectral synths and retro-futurist static, while ‘Prophecy At 1420 MHz’ leans into a slow-building unease. The title nods to the deep space frequency associated with the search for extraterrestrial life, and the track itself folds muffled, altered vocals into the noise, as if they’re trying to surface from underneath it.

They’ve also paired the songs with a video directed by Robert Beatty.

The return has been gathering shape for a while, first via a poster campaign that surfaced in London, New York, California and Shibuya. The imagery echoed the artwork associated with their 1998 debut Music Has The Right To Children, which was enough to send fans into the usual forensic mode that follows anything Boards of Canada do.

Even before this latest announcement, there had been intermittent signs that the duo were still around. Over the past 13 years, those came in the form of random remixes, archival reissues and an NTS DJ mix. Not much, but with Boards of Canada, that has always been part of the point.

Another breadcrumb appeared when fans noticed that a website once used to seed clues about their activity had been revived with the message: “nobody home…” followed by the phrase repeated in Morse code – ” /// -. — -… — -.. -.– / …. — — . .-.-.- .-.-.- .-.-.-“.

Then came reports from fans online that VHS tapes bearing the group’s hexagon-mesh logo had been landing in their hands. According to the archivist page BoC Pages, the tapes contained audio for an advert for a Christian bible school magazine that stopped publishing in 1991.

Tomorrow’s Harvest earned four stars in NME’s 2013 review, which framed Boards of Canada as the “anti-Daft Punk”. The comparison still holds up as a useful shorthand for the different cultural weather each act was making. While the Parisian duo’s Random Access Memories leaned into sunlight, collaborations and high gloss, Tomorrow’s Harvest was described as a darker, less comfortable record, “more nuclear winter than summer anthem.”