Boards of Canada Open the 'Inferno' Portal With 'Introit' and 'Prophecy at 1420 MHz'

Boards of Canada have finally cracked open Inferno. The Scottish electronic duo shared “Introit” and “Prophecy at 1420 MHz,” the opening two tracks from their forthcoming album, alongside a new Robert Beatty-directed video.

Inferno is out May 29 via Warp, according to the band's official site and Warp's release page. That alone makes this more than another cryptic signal from the Boards of Canada bunker. The album is their first full-length since 2013's Tomorrow's Harvest, a record that already felt like an emergency broadcast from a future nobody wanted to admit was arriving.

“Introit” functions like a threshold: short, synthetic, ritualistic, more invocation than single. “Prophecy at 1420 MHz” is the more substantial transmission, built around a patient pulse, ghosted vocal textures, and the sort of degraded sci-fi dread Boards of Canada can still make feel weirdly intimate. NME notes that the title references the deep-space frequency used in the search for extraterrestrial life, which fits the record cycle's whole atmosphere of code, signal, and half-buried message.

The new video continues the VHS-static visual language that has surrounded the rollout. Pitchfork describes it as advancing the “staticky VHS aesthetic and cultish symbolism” introduced during the teaser campaign, while Treble confirms Beatty as the director. Beatty is a natural match for Boards of Canada: his visual work often feels like album art recovered from a dream you were not supposed to remember.

Treble also lists Inferno as an 18-track album, opening with “Introit” and “Prophecy At 1420 MHz” before moving through titles like “Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan,” “Age Of Capricorn,” “Naraka,” “Deep Time,” and “I Saw Through Platonia.” The names read like a syllabus for end-times astronomy, which is to say they read like Boards of Canada titles.

This is not a band that needs to chase urgency. Boards of Canada move at their own occult tempo, and the gap since Tomorrow's Harvest has only made every new detail feel heavier. “Introit” and “Prophecy at 1420 MHz” do not answer every question about Inferno. They do something more useful: they make the door look dangerous enough to walk through.