Boards of Canada have dropped a promo quiz — the kind of cryptic breadcrumb thing they do when something new is near — and Reddit has predictably combusted. Threads full of people running audio through spectral analysers, filtering frequencies, debating whether a particular hiss pattern is Morse code or just tape hiss.

I get why it happens. The band have form for hiding things. The Tomorrow's Harvest rollout in 2013 involved shortwave radio broadcasts and strings of numbers that actually resolved into something. That campaign rewarded obsession. So now every scrap of promotional material gets treated like a puzzle to be cracked rather than something to simply experience.

The quiz itself is fine. Presumably a route toward some announcement, a bit of fun. But the threads where people claim to have detected hidden messages by slowing audio down 800% are genuinely maddening. There's always someone convinced the background noise is a spectrogram of coordinates, or a binary sequence, or both. It isn't.

Sometimes a promotional quiz is just a promotional quiz. Whatever they're announcing, I'd rather hear the actual music.