Boards of Canada is a band that has been elusive as it has been prolific throughout its long and illustrious career. While the group’s productivity took a swift decline after its 2005 album, The Campfire Headphase, its presence still reverberated throughout the electronic music world. It is hard to find an electronic act that isn’t somehow influenced by the warm, organic sounds produced by this beloved Scottish duo.

Tomorrow’s Harvest is a return to glory for this highly acclaimed duo. Tomorrow’s Harvest is filled with immense sonic exploration and it places equal importance on strong rhythms and heady atmospheres. The group distorts obscure vocal samples and layers them tightly within expansive analog instrumentation, allowing plain speeches to take form as an enriching addition to melodies that often remain relatively static. 

While the songs on Tomorrow’s Harvest are dynamic arrangements, they tend to unravel more than they develop. Percussive loops duck in and out, often repeating simplistic phrases, while the instrumentation sticks relatively close to the grain. Once a song has given way to a distinct refrain it tends to stay in that domain, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Tracks like the six-and-a-half-minute “Jacquard Causeway” are a perfect example of this. “Causeway” begins with a minimalistic drumbeat that gives way to arpeggiated synths, but the track gradually strips away its layers to create a down-tempo atmospheric aura, only to build it back up to the clicks and whirrs that gave the song such presence in the first place. 

While it may seem a bit tedious upon first listen to hear simplistic refrains making up the duration of longer songs like this, it’s terribly easy to lose yourself in this chilled out amalgamation of shimmering synths and snappy percussion.

 Tomorrow’s Harvest plays out more like a soundtrack than anything else though—although it’s roughly an hour in length it has a strong sense of deterministic purpose. Perhaps it’s the overly down-tempo tunes that makes it feel so cinematic and extravagant, but either way these fuzzed out aural incantations tend to breath with a life of their own. 

“Collapse” feels like it’s building up to a grandiose release of tension, but instead bleeds into silence and slowly fades into the slow-churning head-bobber “Palace Posy,” a track that explores primal percussive rhythms with warm, encompassing synth lines.

 Brief tracks like “Uritual” and “Telepath” feel like bridges for far-reaching ideas, but still have enough depth and gusto to stand-alone as short sonic explorations. 

While Tomorrow’s Harvest is a gorgeous album on its surface, the real beauty lies in its details. Donning a pair of headphones and catching all of the subtleties that lie within these dense tracks is the best way to consume these extravagant pieces. The sound of distant lasers, chirping birds and electronic blips and buzzes pepper the depths of this album and creates an insatiable desire to go back and explore how deep the rabbit hole truly goes. 

Tomorrow’s Harvest is arguably Boards of Canada’s most tightly-packed album to date. With brilliant use of restraint and release this group has fallen right back into the niche that they built for themselves in the early 2000s. Boards of Canada grasp the inherent qualities of music that can control a listener’s emotions and induce nostalgia. Tomorrow’s Harvest takes listeners on an adventure through the confines of their own mind, and whether the destination is someplace new and innovative is irrelevant because the twists and turns are what makes this album—and the rest of Boards of Canada’s albums—the joyful listening experience that it is.