After a very long, very cryptic teaser campaign, Boards of Canada are officially back—sort of. A mysterious, three-minute piece of music, titled “Tape 5,” appeared on the Scottish duo’s YouTube this morning, with corresponding uploads on the social channels of their longtime label Warp. No information—or even formal confirmation that it is new BoC music—is at hand, however. Listen to “Tape 5” and decide for yourself below.
Boards of Canada’s outsize influence, psychedelic sound palette, and sideways worldview never went away. In a very real sense, however, Boards of Canada did go away—for 13 years. Since their fourth album, 2013’s Tomorrow’s Harvest, intermittent signs of life have appeared in the form of seemingly random remixes, archival reissues, and an NTS DJ mix.
True to form, the Boards of Canada resurrection has murmured to life so quietly that only the most obsessive of code breakers twigged it early on. Last May, Pitchfork received an email tip from a fan pointing to a website once used for BoC clues—but latterly condemned to 404 errors—that had been revived with the following message: “nobody home… /// -. — -… — -.. -.– / …. — — . .-.-.- .-.-.- .-.-.-” That’s the phrase “nobody home” in English and morse code.
The rumor mill fired up in earnest on April 6, when a handful of fans—first on Discogs and Reddit, then across social media—reported receiving VHS tapes imprinted with BoC’s hexagon-mesh logo. According to the obsessive archivists at BoC Pages, the tapes contain audio for an ad for a Christian bible school magazine that stopped publishing in 1991.
A poster campaign followed, with designs reminiscent of the artwork for the band’s 1998 landmark Music Has the Right to Children appearing in London, New York, California, and at the fabled Liquidroom venue in Shibuya, Japan. Though Warp remains tight-lipped, the label posted an Instagram carousel of the posters on April 14 (one shows them side by side with another cryptic comeback campaign’s), followed by today’s upload, which you can watch below.
