Music Has the Right to Children by Boards Of Canada

Music Has the Right to Children, the debut album from Scottish brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin, better known as Boards of Canada, came out on 20 April 1998 through Warp and Skam in the UK and Matador in America. They made it themselves at Hexagon Sun, their own studio out in the Pentland Hills, picking up where the Twoism and Hi Scores EPs left off.

It sounds like a memory you can't quite place: warped vintage synths, tape-worn analogue murk, found sounds and half-heard voices, all riding lazy hip-hop beats. There's something of old public-broadcasting television in it, the soundtrack to a school science film left out in the sun too long, and tracks like "Roygbiv" glow with a queasy, sweet nostalgia. Critics fell hard, and the record has since been hailed as a landmark of electronic music, turning up on best-ever lists from Pitchfork and Mojo and inspiring a whole wave of artists who followed.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.