The Scottish cult act’s career has a lot in common with the fantasy phenomenon, from long gaps between albums to their uncanny ability to bring niche aesthetics to a broad audience.
Before it was the most popular non-Sopranos show in HBO history, before everyone in your Twitter feed was freaking the eff out about the Red Wedding, Game of Thrones was a book you’d find on your older brother's bookshelf in the '90s. There was nothing super-sensational about A Game of Thrones, the first volume in author George R.R. Martin's epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, upon which the TV show is based. It didn't hit the bestseller lists when it was released in 1996. It appealed mostly to aficionados of the fantasy genre, who appreciated its thoughtful, frequently dark new spin on the usual staples of knights and kings and dragons and prophecies.
As the book's sequels came out – A Clash of Kings, which widened the scope, and A Storm of Swords, with the gamechanging, hugely upsetting Red Wedding sequence – both the size and the intensity of the books' fandom grew. The flames were fanned by the longer than usual gap between the publication of Storm in 2000 and volume four, A Feast for Crows, in 2005, after several announced publication dates came and went.
Readers had to wait another six years for the fifth installment, 2011's A Dance with Dragons, at which point some of the series' characters hadn't had new material released for over a decade. By then, the cult had taken over huge swathes of pop culture and the series was seen as the pinnacle of the genre. From humble beginnings sprang a phenomenon, passed around from fan to fan saying “you've gotta read this” – which is exactly how David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the creators of the show, found it themselves.
Today, the Scottish electronic music duo Boards of Canada release Tomorrow’s Harvest, their first album in eight years. In a year stuffed with high-profile musical comebacks – Justin Timberlake, Daft Punk, David Bowie, My Bloody Valentine – this thing's as eagerly anticipated as any of the others. And if you're thinking “Wait, who are these guys?”, that's part of the fun. Like Game of Thrones, they've depended on word of mouth from people who are more like devotees than mere fans to become one of the most acclaimed and important acts in their world.
At every turn, BoC has cultivated an air of mystery. Ok, not quite as completely as Daft Punk – there are no masks involved – but even BoC's most diehard fans took years to discover that sole members Marcus Eoin and Mike Sandison were really brothers. (Marcus dropped the last name “Sandison” in favor of his middle name to keep up the ruse.) They're no longer anonymous or invisible, but they compensate for it by making their music sound eerie and haunted instead.
Their debut full-length, 1998's Music Has the Right to Children, is laden with samples from long-forgotten educational filmstrips and synths that sound cribbed from half-remembered '70s or '80s science fiction movies that gave you weird dreams as a little kid.
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