Boards of Canada

Tomorrow's Harvest

These songs, painstakingly constructed using demanding equipment, succeed at creating a cohesive sense of paranoia, fear, and awe. And that, if nothing else, is worth obsessing over.

Bright spots are woven amidst more ruminative fare, providing a sense of narrative that's too often absent in full-lengths these days. Loaded with recurring motifs and studio trickery, Tomorrow's Harvest makes for an especially cryptic listen.

Tomorrow’s Harvest’s greatest strength is how it brings the classic Boards of Canada sound into the modern age and makes it feel totally fresh and alive again – a rare feat for almost any electronic artist.

It still sounds unmistakably like Boards of Canada, even if their telltale tropes are now scattered across Harvest rather than made to define each of its 17 tracks.

It sounds like an extremely well-produced album that took about eight years of slow studio cooking to produce.

Like a few moments on Tomorrow’s Harvest it’ll take many more listens to decode, but the bulk of the album is immediately dark and succulent, conjuring a beautiful air of malice.

It needs to be listened to in the right sort of atmosphere to reach its full effect, but Boards of Canada's return after seven long years and proved it was worth the wait.

Tomorrow’s Harvest finds the duo launching their sound into Lovecraftian orbit. And it sounds terrific;

What we’re left with is Boards of Canada’s moodiest record, a full-length tinted with atmosphere that unfolds slowly and is happy to allow you to come to it. 

Simulating forward motion is indeed progress, but it would be great if they threaded in a few elements to signify that. Without concreteness they can only get so dark; it’s hard to have a nightmare about something you can’t visualize.

At times, it is a little overwhelming over the 17 tracks, but there are plenty of beautiful moments here, the sort of moments which continue to propel BOC well ahead of many of their IDM contemporaries.