Fake Patriot Slop:
On Boards of Canada’s Inferno

On 28th May, the White House used part of a new Boards of Canada track in a promotional video. Resident Advisor reported on the outrage that emerged from the group’s fanbase:

Comments underneath the video were predictably scathing, with Boards of Canada fans angrily demanding the duo’s music isn’t used for “authoritarian fascist bullshit” and “zoomer edit fake patriot slop.” Another X user described President Trump as “posting movie trailers for World War III like he’s running a Michael Bay fan account.”

There’s an obvious irony to it all. For a group that turned the hypnagogic sampling of public service broadcasting into an artform, is it not apt that they be appropriated in turn by Trump’s psychedelic-fascist social-media team? To be outraged at this development suggests a petulance on behalf of the average BOC fan: our nostalgia must not be sullied with your nostalgia; our postmodernism must not be sullied by your postmodernism.

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— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 28, 2026

In truth, the further we have all travelled from BOC’s warped late-20thC sources, the more inapposite their whole project has become. In the end, it only lends more weight to Alex Williams’ critique of hauntology from 2008:

In a sense Hauntology’s ghostly audio is seen as form of good postmodernism, as set against the bad PoMo of a rampaging retroism. Beached as it seems we are at the end of (cultural) history, it is certainly a seductive argument. By foregrounding the processes at the material level (sampling, versioning, deliberately invoking buried/false childhood memories etc) it is contended that such music comes to terms with the deadlock which we face, the inability to properly think the new as such, and makes of this condition something positive.

This argument was seductive 20 years ago… Is it still? How could it be? Even in 2008, Williams concluded:

For this perspective, Hauntology is a cowardly move, lusting after utopias that never were, or which are now unreachable, a retreat into childhood/youth, just as trapped in the endless re-iterative mechanistics of the postmodern as the lowest form of retroism, merely in a hyper-self-aware form. In summary, hauntology cedes too much ground to what it attempts to oppose, because of an a priori assumption: that there is nothing else, (at this moment in time at least) that nothing else is possible, and as such we are to make the best of this (and that the best we can do is to hint at the possible which remains forever out of reach — with all the pseudo-messianic dimensions this involves). 

This is the central tension between retroism and hauntology. In this moment of Trumpian appropriation, it is on full display. Retroism lusts after past magnificence as if it ever really exists; hauntology reckons with the unsettled and self-aware acknowledgement that the past is uncanny precisely because it is a weird fiction.

Within BOC’s ambiguous evocation of ‘screen memories’ — both the elder-millennial nostalgia for cathode ray tube TVs and VHS tapes, and the Freudian notion that we actually have no memories of our childhoods — there has always been a risk, as Mark Fisher argued, of “legitimat[ing] and propagat[ing] a radically unSpinozist notion of being free: i.e. give free reign to your Inner Child = yr Inner Fascist.”

This hardly describes Boards of Canada especially — more so the attitudes of hauntologist-cum-January-6er Ariel Pink — but such is the irony of a man-child like Trump, in his supposedly outrageous recontextualization of their music, being the one to take their sound a few steps further than they’ve dared to for twenty years… Maybe a little bit of free reign in their own production style wouldn’t hurt!

Boards of Canada have clearly not licensed their music to the Trump administration — which has a habit of using unlicensed music in this sort of context — but their appeal to that regime is hardly unsurprising. The uncanny nature of the past (especially an inner childhood) is a core hauntological predilection — one that easily serves the reactionary nostalgia of North America in particular, as a ‘young’ nation always lusting after simulacra forms of its adolescence.

For Trump to utilise BOC for his propaganda makes sense, unfortunately for them, and it is also perhaps the most unsettling the group has been in decades. In that sense, Trump has inserted uncanniness anew into BOC’s oeuvre. The irony, then, is that it took Trump — and not BOC themselves — to properly unsettle their fanbase.

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Boards of Canada’s new album Inferno bears all the classic hallmarks of a BOC release. There is some movement, some development, but it is hardly perceptible. It’s that old thing you liked… made great again? The sweeping synth vistas evoke Vangelis tracking shots across cyberpunk dystopias, but those visions of a future Los Angeles seem like a far more moribund future-past than ever before.

That doesn’t make it bad, but I’ve heard it all before. Actually, if I was to compare Inferno to any other release, it would be the soundtrack to the 2015 videogame Dying Light — the cheesy postmodern zombie game that’s like Die Hard with the undead, set in a nondescript orientalist North African shanty city…

Above all else, Inferno is charmingly neo-reactionary. A new Boards of Canada album that triggers all my nostalgia for an old Boards of Canada album. Again, it’s not bad. But this return to “the past inside the present” isn’t anywhere near as enthralling as it was twenty years ago. It’s perfectly pleasant, and in some cases, there’s nothing more annoying than that.

It’s not more than I’d have hoped for, nor less — it’s exactly what I’d expect. All of the tracks presented on the new release could have been made twenty-five years ago. Perhaps they were. It feels more archival than a psychedelic offering for 2026. It feels contradictory to refer to it as a “new” record at all.

It’s hard not to be disappointed by that fact. Boards of Canada are, of course, a duo that have an unmistakable sonic signature. They sound wonderfully like themselves here and they own it. It’s not always necessary that a band oscillate wildly, trying to sound like anything but themselves. And yet, they so firmly embody the cancellation of their own future, it’s almost perplexing.

The only reason I can give for why they take so much time between albums is probably that even they get bored with their own sound. There’s clearly no rush to finish a record and move onto the next thing. But rather than try to revitalise themselves, it’s as if they know it’s best to wait for their hype to completely ebb away, until the moment arises when more of the same becomes an exciting prospect again.

At a certain point, it stops being hauntological altogether — and BOC have the last group that warrant an association with that term. Indeed, at its best, ‘hauntological’ music has always been uncanny — not in the sense of its simulacra invocations of the past troubling any sense of authenticity, but in the sense that the uncanny is unsettling.

Inferno‘s album art is, strangely, the most insistently “unsettling” artwork they’ve ever produced. Blind children leer out at you, in AI-slop advertising for the year’s most clichéd horror movie. It makes the banality of the music itself all the more jarring.

By way of a comparison, the best Boards of Canada track, for my money, has always been ‘Happy Cycling’. It’s off-kilter, clipped, jabbing opening produces a tension that unnerves me. When their more standard synth washes float into the mix, that tension is released and gives way to euphoria.

Music Has The Right To Children works as a whole because it dances around that tension pretty well. It’s a haunted record, and the closest they’ve gotten to what Fisher adored about the Ghost Box label:

The mark of the postmodern is the extirpation of the uncanny, the replacing of the unheimlich tingle of unknowingness with a cocksure knowingness and hyper-awareness. Ghost Box, by contrast, is a conspiracy of the half-forgotten, the poorly remembered and the confabulated. Listening to sample-based sonic genres like jungle and (the pre-banal) hip-hop you typically found yourself experiencing déjà vudu, in which a familiar sound, estranged by sampling, nagged just beyond recognizability. Ghost Box releases conjure a sense of artificial déjà vu, where you are duped into thinking that what you are hearing has its origin somewhere in the late 60s or early 70s. Not false, but simulated, memory. The spectres in Ghost Box‘s hauntology are the lost contexts which, we imagine, must have prompted the sounds we are hearing; lost programmes, uncomissioned series, pilots that were never followed-up.

It’s something mainstreamed by Boards of Canada, albeit without any of the specific context provided by Ghost Box releases, and so they’ve never managed to make anything with Ghost Box aplomb. And for all of their breakout’s strengths, they’ve also never managed to repeat it, swapping out that album’s uneasy listening motifs for something far more placid and predictable. Geogaddi, for example, is more like a tribute to nature documentaries than anything especially haunted, but the production is at least inventive in that context. It felt like an attempt at a new direction, a new sound, before they later fell into a comfort zone on The Campfire Headphase, which was nice for what it was, but they’ve hardly budged since and it has led to a series of drawn-out diminishing returns.

Truly, for them, the long 1990s never ended. They exist crystallised at the end of their own history. Something has to give, surely? Have you never felt comfort curdle into claustrophobia? Have you never resented your own predilection for what’s familiar?

There’s nothing uncanny here. Nothing unsettling. Nothing weird. Truly, nothing hauntological. To herald BOC’s Inferno as the welcomed return of a twenty-five-year-old aesthetic sensibility is only more confirmation of how distant we are from the moment when they first made an impact. They weren’t all that ‘hauntological’ then — they were an act mentioned occasionally on the periphery of those discourses, and came to the fore in those contexts only as the most mainstream act to latch onto when ‘hauntology’ left the blogosphere to have its hype moment. It says everything that Trump is more ‘hauntological’ than they are now.