Revision as of 23:30, 22 April 2026

Inferno
Label(s)	Warp Records
Catalogue No(s)	WARPLP496 (2xLP) WARPCD496 (CD) WARP496 (digital)
Release date(s)	29 May 2026
Format(s)	Gatefold 2xLP CD Digital
Running time(s)	69:51 70:00 (Continuous Mix)

Inferno is the upcoming fifth studio album by Boards of Canada, scheduled for release on 29 May 2026 via Warp Records. It is the long-anticipated follow-up to their 2013 album Tomorrow's Harvest - a gap of nearly thirteen years, the band's longest to date between albums.

Tracks

1. "Introit" – 0:36
2. "Prophecy At 1420 MHz" – 5:04
3. "Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan" – 4:44
4. "Age Of Capricorn" – 3:52
5. "Father And Son" – 3:24
6. "Somewhere Right Now In The Future" – 2:26
7. "Naraka" – 5:01
8. "Acts Of Magic" – 1:18
9. "Memory Death" – 2:37
10. "The Word Becomes Flesh" – 5:20
11. "Into The Magic Land" – 4:35
12. "Blood In The Labyrinth" – 4:55
13. "Deep Time" – 3:18
14. "All Reason Departs" – 6:14
15. "Arena Americanada" – 5:22
16. "The Process" – 3:01
17. "You Retreat In Time And Space" – 5:25
18. "I Saw Through Platonia" – 2:39

Leadup

Main article: Road to Inferno

Speculation for the album's release preceded its official announcement by over a decade, with the band and its associates sparsely giving out new information. Some noteworthy events are listed below. For a more detailed look on the band's activities during this period, see the article Road to Inferno.

Official Statements

• Marcus Eoin, June 2013: "It feels like neither of those things from our perspective because we've always been working! We'd be making music anyway even if nobody was listening, and we've no intention of stopping, so this is just a continuation." — in response to the question "Is this record a new beginning or maybe the end? How does it feel for you?", from the interview The Charms of the Sphinx.

• MDG, June 2022: "Nothing specific I'm allowed to share yet unfortunately, just that a new album is on its way."

• Bleep, April 2023: "we don't know when the new BoC album is coming" — note the use of when rather than if, implying the album was confirmed to be in progress.^[1]

• BoC's official Threads, July 2023: "Follow here for future news & announcements etc."

Instagram Likes (2025)

Starting in March 2025, BoC liked numerous comments across their official Instagram, the vast majority on the topic of new music. See Category:Instagram for the full archive and the LP5 table for a summary.

Cosecha Transmisiones

Main article: Cosecha-transmisiones.com

On 1 May 2025, users on Twoism and r/boardsofcanada noticed that the website cosecha-transmisiones.com, originally used in the promotion of Tomorrow's Harvest had been updated to read:

nobody home... /// -. --- -... --- -.. -.-- / .... --- -- . .-.-.- .-.-.- .-.-.-

Over the following months the site displayed various errors and server configuration sites before being redirected to the original Tomorrow's Harvest Transmission video on 29 August 2025. These changes have not been acknowledged publically.

New Merchandise

On 6 June 2025, new Boards of Canada merchandise was announced and exclusively available at Bleep, produced on unisex Stanley and Stella blanks with a Boards of Canada neck label.^[2][3][4][5] Shipping from Bleep's UK and USA warehouses began on 11 June. The release was widely read as a prelude to an album announcement.

Twoism 30

On 15 August 2025, Boards of Canada uploaded a Twoism 30th-anniversary celebration video to their social media accounts.^{[6][7][8][9][10]} The band's first publicly-available vinyl mini album Twoism—originally limited to 100 copies in 1995—was made available through Bleep.com.

On the same post, Boards of Canada liked a large batch of comments speculating about a forthcoming album.

Promotional Campaign

Main article: 2026 Promo Campaign

In early April 2026, multiple fans received unmarked VHS tapes through the mail, with sender addresses related to Warp and their online storefront Bleep. About a week after, posters with imagery reminiscent of the band started appearing in multiple places around the UK and US. For an in-depth look at the days preceding the album's announcement, see the article 2026 Promo Campaign.

Title and Themes

As a word, Inferno references hell and places reminiscent of it. It is the most explicit reference to religion and the occult since their 2002 album Geogaddi and 2000 EP In a Beautiful Place out in the Country. The album's titles also refer to concepts in cosmology and physics heavily.

• An "Introit" is a song or psalm that is sung or recited at the beginning of a Christian mass.
• "Father And Son" could reference the Holy Trinity, which consists of the two and The Holy Spirit.
• "The Word Becomes Flesh" is a quotation from Psalm 1:14 of the Book of John.
• "Naraka" references the realm of hell seen in Indian religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism.
• "The Process" could refer to the Process Church of the Final Judgement, a new religious movement which briefly existed in the 1960s and 70s.
• "Prophecy At 1420 MHz" references the hydrogen line, a specific wavelength of radiation emitted by hydrogen as it undergoes a quantum transition. It has been used to investigate the properties of the universe, and search for extraterrestrial life.
• "Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan" refers to the first three elements of the periodic table and the mythical sea creature.
• "Age Of Capricorn" refers to the tenth sign of the astrological zodiac.
• "I Saw Through Platonia" could refer to a concept by Julian Barbour of a realm called Platonia, which contains every possible configuration of the universe.

Trivia

• Inferno has been assigned the catalog number WARP496. This seems to be a deliberate request from the band themselves, as preceding Warp releases such as Squarepusher's Kammerkonzert and Oneohtrix Point Never's Tranquilizer have catalog numbers of 417 and 411, respectively.
  • 496 is mathematically and physically significant in several ways:
  • It is the third perfect number — a positive integer equal to the sum of its proper divisors: 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + 31 + 62 + 124 + 248 = 496. The first two perfect numbers are 6 and 28. 496 = 2⁴·(2⁵ − 1), where 31 is a Mersenne prime.
  • It is the 31st triangular number — the sum of all integers from 1 to 31.
  • In theoretical physics, 496 is the dimension of the gauge groups E₈×E₈ and SO(32) — the two groups that allow heterotic string theory to be anomaly-free under the Green–Schwarz mechanism (1984). It is one of the most recognisable numbers in 20th-century mathematical physics.
  • The choice is consistent with Boards of Canada's history of numerical encoding (e.g. Geogaddi contains 23 tracks tied to the "23 Enigma" / Discordianism, a 66:06 running time read as 666, and a Japanese release date of 13 February 2002 keyed to Revelation 13:18) and with the album's pervasive physics and cosmology references — see "Prophecy At 1420 MHz", "Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan", "Deep Time" and "I Saw Through Platonia".

• The album runs for 69:51. However, a companion digital release - Inferno (Continuous Mix), runs for exactly 70 minutes. This seems to be deliberate, as 70 has carried meaning in the band's past releases. For example:
  • Music70 is the name of Mike and Marcus's own label, owned and operated out of Hexagon Sun.
  • "Sixtyten" (on Music Has the Right to Children, 1998) - the title is the number 70 written out as "sixty + ten". The track's own lyric samples even extract their Earth, Wind & Fire source from 1:10 of the original record, which is 70 seconds.
  • "The Smallest Weird Number" (track 9 on Geogaddi, 2002) directly refers to 70, the smallest weird number (an abundant integer that is not semiperfect). Although the track runs 1:17, its melody cuts out at exactly 1:10 — i.e. 70 seconds.

Release Notes

(To be populated from Warp's promotional copy once released.)

Quotes

(To be populated as interviews appear around the release.)

See Also

• LP5 – archived speculation/leadup page
• 2026 Promo Campaign
• Tomorrow's Harvest – previous studio album (2013)
• Discography
• Timeline
• Statements from Hexagon Sun

External Links

• Boards of Canada on Warp Records
• Boards of Canada on Bleep
• Twoism discussion: General New Release Speculation Topic Part II

References

1. ↑ https://bleep.com/newsletters/boards-of-canada--music-has-the-right-to-children-25th-anv-1
2. ↑ https://bleep.com/boards-of-canada-2025-merchandise
3. ↑ https://warp.net/artists/boards-of-canada
4. ↑ https://bsky.app/profile/bleep.com/post/3lqxaqw2mj22s
5. ↑ https://www.instagram.com/p/DKkNBcdIEfz/?img_index=1
6. ↑ https://www.instagram.com/p/DNYMbzWMJIZ/
7. ↑ https://www.threads.com/@boardsofcanada/post/DNYN0UYMSVj
8. ↑ https://bsky.app/profile/boardsofcanada.bsky.social/post/3lwhdn4y3vk2d
9. ↑ https://x.com/boardsofcanada/status/1956358894902550775
10. ↑ https://www.facebook.com/boardsofcanada/videos/1494936234977208