Revision as of 21:02, 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 Continuous Mix (digital-only, 70:00)
Running time(s)	69:51

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.

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

Total running time – 69:51

Announcement

The album was officially announced in the lead-up to its 29 May 2026 release date, following over a decade of speculation and a substantial uptick in activity on Boards of Canada's social media and affiliated web properties through 2025 and into early 2026.

For the prior period of anticipation and speculation, see the article formerly titled LP5.

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."

Leadup

Instagram Likes (2025)

Main article: LP5

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 a rotating sequence of error messages and cryptic fragments before being redirected to the original Tomorrow's Harvest Transmission video on 29 August 2025. With the announcement of Inferno, the relationship between the 2025 reactivation of the site and the eventual album release is an open question for fans.

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.

Title and Themes

The title Inferno is Dante Alighieri''s first canticle of the Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1320), the descent through the nine circles of hell. The album's 18 tracks thus naturally read as 9 + 9 — descent and ascent, Inferno and Purgatorio — with the closing "I Saw Through Platonia" supplying the Paradisos beatific vision. Taken title by title, Inferno is the most explicitly religious and mystical record in the Boards of Canada catalogue — a far more concentrated pursuit of the cult-and-scripture thread that ran through In a Beautiful Place out in the Country and Geogaddi.

Christian Liturgy

• "Introit" — the processional opening of a Catholic Mass.
• "Father And Son" — the first two persons of the Holy Trinity.
• "The Word Becomes Flesh" — direct citation of the Gospel of John 1:14 (the Incarnation).

Eastern Religions

• "Naraka" — the hell realms of Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Sikh cosmology.
• "Memory Death" — dissolution of memory in the Tibetan bardo (Bardo Thödol).

Occult, Magick, and New Religious Movements

• "Acts Of Magic" — Crowleyan Magick as the art of change conforming to will.
• "The Process" — The Process Church of the Final Judgment, 1960s – 70s new-religious / cult movement (Robert de Grimston, ex-Scientology), syncretising Christ / Satan / Jehovah / Lucifer.
• "Into The Magic Land" — the mystical Otherworld / Faerie / land of the dead.

Prophecy, Cosmos, Creation

• "Prophecy At 1420 MHz" — the hydrogen line, the SETI frequency, framed prophetically.
• "Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan" — Big Bang nucleosynthesis + the biblical sea-monster of Job 41 / Psalm 74 / Isaiah 27:1.
• "Age Of Capricorn" — astrological / precessional age (Capricorn = the sea-goat).
• "Deep Time" — geological time as the Hindu/Buddhist kalpa, as eternity.

Sacrifice and Martyrdom

• "Blood In The Labyrinth" — the Cretan Minotaur myth, the ritual sacrifice of Athenian youths, and the Chartres labyrinth as medieval pilgrimage substitute.
• "Arena Americanada" — the Roman arena as the space of martyrdom / gladiatorial spectacle, portmanteau'd through America / Canada / Americana.

Contemplation, Time Transcendence, Vision

• "Somewhere Right Now In The Future" — the theological nunc stans, divine timelessness.
• "You Retreat In Time And Space" — the monastic / Buddhist retreat.
• "All Reason Departs" — Goya's "sleep of reason breeds monsters" paired with the mystical via negativa / apophatic tradition (Pseudo-Dionysius, Eckhart, The Cloud of Unknowing).
• "I Saw Through Platonia" — physicist Julian Barbour's timeless configuration-space of the universe, read through Plato's ladder of ascent and the Neoplatonic / Christian-mystical tradition of "seeing through" appearance to the One. The album's closing beatific vision.

Structural Note

At 18 tracks the album naturally divides 9 + 9, mirroring Dante's 9 circles of hell (doubled for descent-and-ascent, or Inferno-and-Purgatorio). The shape moves: liturgical entry ("Introit") → prophetic cosmos → Trinity → eschatology → Eastern hell → occult practice → Buddhist memory-death → Incarnation → mystical pilgrimage → sacrificial myth → deep time → ecstatic unreason → arena / martyrdom → cult → retreat → beatific vision.

Trivia

Catalogue number 496

The Inferno vinyl, CD and digital editions carry the catalogue numbers WARPLP496, WARPCD496 and WARP496 respectively. 496 appears to be a deliberate choice rather than the next number in Warp's sequence:

• The immediately preceding Warp albums carry much lower catalogue numbers — Nala Sinephro's Endlessness is WARPLP358 (Sept 2024), kwes's Kinds is WARPLP400 (27 Feb 2026), and Squarepusher's April 2026 release is WARPLP417. Seven weeks after Squarepusher at 417, the catalogue jumps 79 numbers straight to 496 for Inferno.
• Warp's digital (WARPDA) sequence shows the same jump: recent numbers include WARPDA408, 411, 414, 415, 417, then skip to WARPDA496 as the digital SKU for Inferno.^[11]

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".

Running time 70:00

The album proper runs 69:51. However, a companion digital release — Inferno (Continuous Mix), issued alongside the album on 29 May 2026 via Bleep as a standalone pre-order in MP3, FLAC and WAV 24-bit formats^[12] — is exactly 70:00 in length. The round 70-minute target appears deliberate.

70 carries dense religious and mystical weight that is consistent with the album's cross-tradition themes:

• Septuagint (LXX, literally "seventy") — the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, legendarily produced by 70 (or 72) translators under Ptolemy II. It is the Old Testament used by the early Christian Church and remains the canonical text of the Eastern Orthodox tradition. A natural pairing with "The Word Becomes Flesh".
• The 70 disciples sent out by Jesus in Luke 10:1, mirroring the 70 nations of Genesis 10's Table of Nations — the traditional list of all the peoples of the world.
• 70 elders of Israel (Numbers 11:16-25), the original Sanhedrin — the body that, in the Gospel narratives, tries Jesus.
• 70 years of Babylonian exile (Jeremiah 25:11, 29:10) — an exact span of captivity and return. Thematically adjacent to "You Retreat In Time And Space".
• Daniel's 70 weeks (Daniel 9:24-27) — one of the most famous apocalyptic prophecies in scripture, spelling out the sequence leading to "the end of desolations". A direct parallel to "Prophecy At 1420 MHz" and the album title's descent-and-judgement frame.
• In Kabbalah, the 70 names of God and the 70 faces of Torah — each verse holding 70 legitimate readings.

The number 70 is a long-running, explicit motif inside Boards of Canada's own catalogue:

• "The Smallest Weird Number" (track 9 on Geogaddi, 2002) — the title is a direct mathematical reference to 70, the smallest weird number (an abundant integer that is not semiperfect). The Geogaddi track article makes the tie explicit: "'The Smallest Weird Number' is 70. As in Music70, Boards of Canada's own label." Further: although the track runs 1:17, its melody cuts out at exactly 1:10 — i.e. 70 seconds — embedding the number in the track's construction as well as its title.
• "Sixtyten" (on Music Has the Right to Children, 1998) — the title is the number 70 written out as "sixty + ten", an archaic / Anglo-Saxon form. The track's own lyric samples even extract their Earth, Wind & Fire source from 1:10 of the original record — the same 70-second timestamp as the Smallest Weird Number melody break.
• Music70 (also written Music70.com) — Mike and Marcus's own art, film and design collective, owned and operated out of Hexagon Sun. The "70" is baked into the band's visual identity and has appeared as a matrix etching on BoC vinyl.
• Music Has the Right to Children in its US / 2004 Warp reissue edition — the definitive extended form of the debut album, with "Happy Cycling" appended — has a running time of 70:42. In other words, the band's canonical first album (in its reissue form) and Inferno (in its Continuous Mix form) both land at ~70 minutes.
• "1969" (Geogaddi, 2002) and "Seven Forty Seven" (Warp20 Unheard, 2009) extend the pattern of numerical-title tracks that reference the late-1960s / 1970s cultural moment.
• The Boards of Canada sound-world is explicitly identified — on the band's own wiki entry — with "the late seventies and early eighties when there were psychedelic videos on Sesame Street, and the Cold War was in full swing." The 1970s National Film Board of Canada documentary-score palette is the project's foundational sample-and-production aesthetic.

Taken with the 496-number catalogue choice above, the running time strengthens the reading that Inferno is numerologically constructed: 70 (biblical / Kabbalistic completeness) and 496 (the third perfect number; anomaly-cancellation in heterotic string theory).

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
11. ↑ https://warp.net/discography
12. ↑ https://bleep.com/release/590977-boards-of-canada-inferno-continuous-mix