Job to Be Done
Boards of Canada, Talking Machines, and Domestic Bliss
This is not a review of Inferno, Boards of Canada's first album in thirteen years, but I'm sure there are plenty of those by this point – hot takes and cupcakes from everyone who's been exposed to any or all of the eighteen tracks and finding themselves disappointed or enthralled or befuddled or indifferent.
A ten-out-of-ten scale "meh" was my reaction when the duo dropped hints via the Bleep online shop a couple of months ago, not because I don't like them. Their Hi Scores EP was our entry point in 1997 when a particularly excited student DJ at my alma mater's radio station snagged a copy for the playlist. Nancy and I who were community volunteers at the time were intrigued enough to later fork out import prices for Music Has the Right to Children the following year (weeks before we heard that Matador Records had licensed it for US distribution).
This isn't to say that we're "old school" BoC* grognards. Sure, we have all the albums, a number of EPs, and matching t-shirts we ordered from Bleep on this side of the millennium. On the other hand, the enthusiasm with which some folks dove into the oblique messaging that preceded Tomorrow's Harvest in 2013 showed me that our fandom metric was rookie-number stuff.
I spent yesterday evening listening to Inferno twice.
The first pass was on the couch, the album downloaded to an iPod Classic we've had since 2009, playing through speakers we bought in 1999. I had Delia the dog curled up next to me, oblivious to the "hoomany noises" on the stereo, and I also had two large language models running on parallel browser tabs. Nancy was at the movies with a friend.
Inferno opens with "Introit" — a word meaning a psalm sung at the beginning of a Christian mass — and moves immediately into "Prophecy at 1420 MHz," which is doing exactly what it says on the tin. 1420 megahertz is the hydrogen line: neutral hydrogen, most abundant element in the universe, emitting at a frequency that radio astronomers use to map the cosmos and that SETI researchers have long proposed as a natural hailing frequency for any civilization paying attention. Add the Wow! signal and you have a lovely unstable triangle: cosmic measurement, alien contact, religious foretelling. This is, as one of the machines noted, extremely BoC. Not space music in the sleek sci-fi sense but signal-as-revelation, signal-as-contamination, signal-as-something-you-should-maybe-not-have-heard.
The religious and fundamentalist soundbites that accumulate through the record's midsection had me thinking of Skinny Puppy in their "video nasties" period — the early Nettwerk material where evangelical media saturation and political violence felt newly entangled, and the horror was partly the horror of broadcast itself. "Father and Son" takes snippets from what I'm guessing is a radio call-in show:
"I love you, but I love the Lord"
"Why can't you bring that same feeling home?"
The cut-up that could have been at home on a Negativland album gets choreographed into an oddly compelling, almost R&B piece, thanks to the soundbites being forced into melismatic runs. It could have been comedy, but neither is it po-faced didacticism.
BoC have always been interested in media as a carrier of ideology. Previously the ideology was soft, subliminal, gently menacing — playground recordings and BBC educational films keeping the strangeness at an aesthetic distance. Inferno removes the insulation. The fundamentalist soundbite isn't archival curiosity in 2026 the way an Open University presenter was in 1998. It's live material with a direct relationship to measurable harm.
Thirteen years is a long time. Long enough for the world to have experienced Brexit, two Trump administrations, a pandemic, Ukraine, Gaza, and the broader realignment of liberal democracies. The rivet heads of the Wax/Trax! and Nettwerk lineage imagined dystopia arriving with jackboots and visible surveillance architecture — vivid, dramatic, operatic. We got some of that, but what mostly arrived was harder to render dramatically: terms of service agreements, engagement algorithms, the slow erosion of shared epistemic ground. Control without a coherent controller. Mark Fisher's "capitalist realism" made ambient. The mundane prosaic dystopia, no less messed up for being boring.
When the world got weird, BoC got more explicitly weird. The safe uncanny of the early records — the warmth of something irradiated, the affect of degraded tape — would have been a liability now. A retreat. Inferno is the sound of not looking away.
The sonic shift is real but continuous. There are "air pockets" of the Music Has the Right to Children palette — a brief ROYGBIV wistfulness in "You Retreat in Time and Space" that functions less as nostalgia than as a signature in the corner of a painting, an acknowledgment rather than a retreat. The same sensibility, the same angle of vision, looking at a world that got considerably stranger in the interim. The album ends on a heartbeat that is cut rather than faded. Not elegiac. Declarative. Things don't dissolve into memory. They stop.
The "job to be done" framing — borrowed from product management, applied here with full awareness of its bluntness — is: Boards of Canada create listening environments where obsolete, degraded, or culturally overdetermined signals become emotionally active again. Public information film, playground voice, fundamentalist soundbite, 1420 MHz cosmic reference, a Roland D-50-ish bass thunk under neon Miami Vice dread — all become material in the same operation. Not nostalgia. Re-enchantment under suspicion. The old palette remains legible because it was never merely the point. It was the first language they used to do the work. Inferno is them proving the work survives a change in vocabulary.
As for talking to machines while this was happening: it was less strange than it sounds and stranger than it should be. The LLMs were useful as thinking partners precisely because they could hold the Fisher and Erik Davis references, the Slayer benchmark for genuine confrontation, the POSIWID read on what the hauntology scene actually accomplished, the connection between the D-50 palette and the specific quality of 1980s American self-mythologizing. The machine conversation tracked the record in real time, which is a different thing from a review, and probably a tainted document with compromised co-authors.
And then Nancy came home just as the second playthough started.
"Koko perhe on sohvalla," or the whole family is on the sofa. The laptop gets closed, Delia scampers and jumps on her humans, Nancy and I listen through a few songs together before she decompresses for the night, wandering back a few times to do a bit of spontaneous interpretive dance. We joke, we laugh, we observe a few things that I hadn't noticed on the first run through.
Inferno is preoccupied with signal, prophecy, broadcast, mediated voices, cosmic frequencies, and the uncanny present. I listened to it while metabolizing it in dialogue with machines. The machines are themselves a transmission arriving from a future that wasn't quite predicted. And I listened to it again with my family in the frame. All the analysis and scaffolding got set aside, and the atmospheres and melodies remained in a domestic present tense.
The dystopia is mundane and the tools are strange and Inferno sounds like it was made for exactly this Thursday evening.
Sandison and Eoin probably couldn't have scripted a more appropriate listening context. The signal, as it turns out, is everywhere.
Inferno is out now on Warp Records.
* To the veterans of a thousand psychic wars, those three letters represent Blue Öyster Cult, or BÖC. Case sensitive diacritical marks make all the difference.