After many years – 13 to be precise – of rumoured, teased and wished-for returns, one of the most mythologised acts in electronic music are finally back.

Following a mysterious rollout, the hugely influential duo of Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin, better known as Boards of Canada, recently announced their new album, Inferno.

To celebrate this most auspicious of events, we asked the host of the mind-expanding Acid Horizon podcast Sereptie – the creator of an oracle deck partly influenced by Boards of Canada and coiner of the phrase “corduroy psychedelia” for the feeling evoked by the band’s hauntological tones – to call on a cult committee of diehards to decode the duo’s back catalogue.

Over to Sereptie, Fredd-E, who runs bocpages, and musician and writer Jack Chuter, who is currently working on a book about the duo and recently appeared on an Acid Horizon podcast episode that traced their mythology, philosophy, and sensory world.

Twoism (1995)

Boards of Canada’s 1995 EP was limited to roughly 100 copies, distributed via their own Music70 label. Self-financed and sent to artists the duo respected, it caught the attention of Autechre‘s Sean Booth, who pointed them towards Skam Records. The helmeted space rangers adorning the EP’s cover are the two lone survivors from The Killings at Outpost Zeta (1980), a low-budget Alien clone whose retro warmth enshrouds a world troubled by a hostile climate and eerie disappearances – themes that foreshadow the band’s catalogue to come.

Hi Scores (1996)

Six tracks of boom-clack percussion borne on beds of austere analogue. The EP’s unassuming robin’s-egg-blue cardstock sleeve indulges an early taste for the tactile cipher – its Braille on the label text prefiguring the band’s later Alternate Reality Game-style rollouts via vinyl and VHS. The title itself may conceal an occult marker: the ‘Hi’ is believed to reference Hell Interface, the duo’s alias under which they’ve released various esoteric tracks and sonic oddities.

Music Has the Right to Children (1998)

Michael Sandison remarked: “There is a story behind every title we use. If a title seems made up, it’s either an equation, an acronym, or a hybrid.” The duo’s first album for Warp inverts a 1970s music textbook entitled Children Have the Right to Music, twisting civic virtue into subliminal menace. The now-iconic cover depicts a family with faces under erasure – the unsettling absence conjuring the uncanny ambiguity of the band’s music: at once depersonalising and deeply personal. The photo’s scenic overlook on Mt Norquay Road above Banff, Alberta, has since become a pilgrimage destination for devotees. Music writer Simon Reynolds dubbed Music Has the Right… “the greatest psychedelic album of the 90s”.

Peel Session (1999)

Boards of Canada are notoriously averse to publicity, their avoidance of press serving as a form of image management that deepens the mystique of their catalogue. Few photographs of the duo circulate, and even fewer recorded interviews. Their session for John Peel from 1998 preserves the sole known audio fragment of their voices, Peel chatting with Michael and Marcus before playing XYZ. The clip survives on YouTube.

In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country (2000)

Religious cults are a recurrent subject matter in Boards of Canada’s work. The track Amo Bishop Roden from this EP names the self-appointed custodian of the Branch Davidians’ Mount Carmel property following the 1993 Waco siege. Their obsession with cults seems to remain unabated: the VHS tapes dispatched as part of the Inferno ARG campaign are laced with audio lifted from a vintage Moody Bible Institute advert, while the video for Tape 05 contains archival footage of Uzi-brandishing Rajneeshees and devotional gatherings of their entranced adherents. The status of cults remains ambiguous in Boards of Canada’s cosmology, undoubtedly vehicles for exploitation, but enclaves that mirror something of the band’s own idyllic reclusion.

Geogaddi (2002)

To date, the band’s most pointedly satanic album. Clocking in at exactly 66 minutes and six seconds (and 666 megabytes when ripped to MP3), Geogaddi contains 23 tracks, a number evoking the occult significance of Robert Anton Wilson’s 23 enigma concept. The whole disc is pitched considerably darker than its predecessors. For those nostalgic for Salad Fingers, David Firth’s early 2000s web animation, Beware the Friendly Stranger and other tracks drawn from Geogaddi served as its de facto soundtrack.

The Campfire Headphase (2005)

Boards of Canada’s sun-baked road trip album follows a traveller in the North American desert, circa late 1970s, whose mind unspools before a campfire. The cover art is designed to appear as an old Polaroid left for decades on a car’s dashboard. Hazy guitars – “sampled to hell and back”, in Sandison’s words – swell beneath Campfire’s flushed folk futurism. Despite the bohemian leanings of the record, Sandison is characteristically blunt: “As if we make music for yoga sessions at sunset. Fuck off!” The album’s release also brought the long-rumoured revelation that the duo are, in fact, brothers.

Trans Canada Highway (2006)

The final leg of the open road, this EP recasts Campfire’s sun-baked excursion in a darker, more glacial palette. It features both the original and an Odd Nosdam remix of Dayvan Cowboy, and a video by Melissa Olson – a classic heaven-and-earth meditation that mashes up film clips of Joseph Kittinger’s Project Excelsior parachute jumps with footage of surfer Laird Hamilton. Owners of a 500 or 800 model Dodge truck from 1977 will instantly recognise the cover art lifted directly from the operating manual.

Tomorrow’s Harvest (2013)

Tomorrow’s Harvest heralds the brothers’ shift towards a sonic landscape that welcomes rather than resists oncoming global catastrophe. The album embodies the cinematic influence of 1980s horror and sci-fi, pushing further their penchant for VHS video nasties. Viewing the cover art is like having a heatstroke in the end times: an ominous snapshot of the San Francisco skyline seen through toxic fog. Tomorrow’s Harvest conceals a mirror structure, the album an audio palindrome centred on the middle track, Collapse. Fans also savoured the record’s ARG rollout, involving strategically encoded vinyl dispatched across multiple platforms and a live desert listening party coordinated through satellite imagery. Sandison has praised the fanbase’s dedication: “Our listeners seem to be really cool, savvy types of people. They didn’t let us down.”

Inferno (2026)

Many fans had all but written off the duo’s return. But then came the tapes. Beginning on 6 April, 2026, select Warp/Bleep customers received VHS cassettes emblazoned with a white seven-hexagon cluster logo. Haunted promo posters bearing the same emblem appeared in major cities worldwide. The tapes contained a cryptic audio-visual transmission, now understood as a degraded prelude to Tape 05 – the band’s first official new release in 13 years. The question remains: have Boards of Canada returned to save us from ourselves – or to perish with us, in ecstasy, as the world burns?