Boards of Canada share first new music from comeback album Inferno with double A-side Introit and Prophecy At 1420 MHz

Boards of Canada have released the first music from their comeback album Inferno. The Scottish electronic duo shared the double A-side Introit and Prophecy At 1420 MHz, the opening two tracks from the record, ahead of its May 29 release via Warp.

The album will be Boards of Canada’s fifth studio release and their first since 2013’s Tomorrow’s Harvest. It runs to 18 tracks and will arrive in multiple physical formats as well as digitally. Pre-orders and pre-saves are available here.

Introit plays like a brief, shadowy prelude, while Prophecy At 1420 MHz stretches out as a slow-building, uneasy track named for the deep space frequency associated with the search for extraterrestrial life. The two songs are paired with a video directed by Robert Beatty.

News of the return began with a poster campaign that used artwork reminiscent of the duo’s 1998 debut Music Has The Right To Children. Fans spotted the designs in London, New York, California and Shibuya.

Boards of Canada have offered only scattered signs of activity in the 13 years since Tomorrow’s Harvest, including remixes, archival reissues and an NTS DJ mix. Another clue appeared when a fan traced a revived website previously used for the group’s cryptic teases. It displayed the message “nobody home…” followed by the same phrase in Morse code.

Fans also reported receiving VHS tapes marked with Boards of Canada’s hexagon-mesh logo. According to the archivist page BoC Pages, the tapes contained audio for an ad for a Christian bible school magazine that stopped publishing in 1991.

Tomorrow’s Harvest received four stars in an NME review in 2013, which called the duo the “anti-Daft Punk.” The review added: “While the Parisian robot duo’s Random Access Memories is full of sunshine, light and high-profile collaborations, Tomorrow’s Harvest is a dark, often uncomfortable affair, more nuclear winter than summer anthem.”