Boards of Canada are back. The Scottish electronic duo will release a new LP called Inferno, ending a 13-year wait since their last album and setting off a slow-burn campaign that began with mystery mailings, cryptic posters and a string of new music.

In early April 2026, a handful of people received a VHS tape in the mail marked with a pattern of seven hexagons. The tape was filled with degraded visuals and audio. A few days later, posters in garish reds and blues appeared across London, New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo, each carrying the same shape in its corners. Warp Records, the pair’s longtime label, then announced the imminent arrival of Boards of Canada’s fifth LP later that month.

The rollout has the feel of an old Boards of Canada puzzle, and that is the point. The duo, brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin, have spent years inspiring the kind of devotion that turns every title, image and interview fragment into evidence. Their work is built from wavering tape loops, crunching downtempo drums, synth melodies and samples, a sound that has long drawn listeners toward ideas of nostalgia, numerology, cults, the apocalypse and everything in between.

The first clue arrived as a teaser video titled Tape 05, later confirmed to be the album cut Deep Time. Two more tracks, Introit and Prophecy At 1420 MHz, followed. Deep Time carries a harp-like melody, while Prophecy At 1420 MHz is driven by a prominent robotic vocal, keeping the duo’s reputation for eerie, half-remembered texture intact even as the new material points toward a fresh chapter.

The release also reaches back to the start of the Boards of Canada story. Their first known release was 1987’s Catalog 3, a super limited cassette tape issued through their own Music70 label when the act still existed as a slightly larger band. Other early releases, including Acid Memories, Play By Numbers and Hooper Bay, were only ever handed to friends and family in the late 1980s and early 1990s, building a private mythology long before the wider audience arrived.

That history helps explain why Inferno has landed as more than just a new record. Boards of Canada have always made music that asks to be studied as much as heard, and their fans have responded in kind, tracking the smallest clues for years. What begins as a new LP announcement now arrives as the latest chapter in a catalog that has always treated secrecy as part of the composition.

The question is no longer whether the duo would return. It is how far this new record will push the atmosphere they have spent decades refining, and whether Inferno will deepen the mystery or finally crack it open.