Boards of Canada announce first album in eight years

A sprawling discussion erupted on 4chan’s music board this week following the announcement of a new Boards of Canada studio album, their first full-length release since 2013’s Tomorrow’s Harvest.

According to the OP, the Scottish brothers unveiled their fifth studio album, titled “Inferno,” set for a May 29, 2026 release. The announcement included an 18-track roster ranging from the 36-second “Introit” to the 6-minute-plus “All Reason Departs,” along with a teaser track titled “Tape 05” uploaded to the official BoC YouTube account. Users on the board reportedly claimed that a continuous mix version would accompany the vinyl and CD editions.

The response oscillated wildly between ecstatic and measured. One user wrote that tracks like “Reach for the Dead,” “Nothing is Real,” and “New Seeds” rank “among some of their best,” while praising the band’s rumored emphasis on vocal distortion as evidence of artistic growth. Another commenter noted they “instantly pre-ordered both CD and vinyl” despite tempering their enthusiasm: “I still think of Tomorrow’s Harvest as a ‘new’ record, and then remember that when it came out my son, who is off to university later this year, had just started infant school.”

Dissenters proved vocal. One respondent griped that every post-Music Has the Right to Children release is “vastly superior” to the debut, calling tracks like “Rue the Whirl” outright boring. A user discussing the band’s prior album concluded: “They were really taking things to a very high conceptual level when things clicked”, but acknowledged stretches of emptiness that left them “disappointed.”

The thread devolved into broader cultural speculation, with one user launching into an elaborate conspiracy theory: the brothers “created the 6 7 meme to roll out the album” and have been cultivating “memetic energy” through drill rap production under a pseudonym. They allegedly predicted Gen Alpha would “throw their phones away” and demand videotape-only media consumption upon Inferno’s release.

Other commenters shared apocryphal anecdotes, including a supposedly firsthand account of encountering the duo at a Scottish grocery store attempting to leave with unpaid VHS tapes.

Users also debated the band’s financial model. According to one commenter, the brothers “owned their own business and/or had normal jobs”, a fact allegedly bannable to discuss on the old Twoism fan forum. Another user credited their early success selling physical media before streaming “fucking sucks,” enabling them to release music on their own timeline without commercial pressure.