The Scottish electronic duo’s first full-length in nearly 13 years is another meticulous and transfixing entry in their sporadic catalog. For over three decades, Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin have raised a mist of mystery around Boards of Canada, their revered electronic-psychedelic-ambient-collage project. The Scottish duo didn’t even publicly acknowledge that they were brothers until a rare in-person interview in 2005, tied to the release of their third album. Inferno is Boards of Canada’s first full-length in nearly 13 years. (What else have they been up to since then? Unclear!) It’s another meticulous and transfixing entry in their sporadic catalog that’s worthy of deep study. Songs “Somewhere Right Now in the Future,” “Memory Death,” and “The Process” feel haunted, or like they might decay into dust moments after hitting your ears. “Father and Son” and “The Word Becomes Flesh” have an unsettling jauntiness lurking within them that feels like a cynical joke. As the title suggests, Inferno finds Boards of Canada ruminating on religion, usually the darker side of the subject: the sinner inside every human, a vengeful God, realms of never-ending suffering. They incorporate and corrupt found samples of American voices like Brian Eno and David Byrne once did on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, but this time portending doom. But on songs like “Deep Time” and “You Retreat in Time and Space” there are also evocations of rebirth and salvation—hopes that there is meaning in this world, and the ones beyond it.