Of all the countless names of subgenres generated in the past few decades, intelligent dance music–aka IDM–has got to be the most loaded. The name itself is reactionary, an attempt to embrace the primal desire for physical movement while at the same time rejecting basically every form of dance music in existence up to its point. And while Boards of Canada are the legendary virgin-birthed gods of IDM, to call what they do “dance music” is a little misleading. Many of their songs have a beat, yes, but it’s hard to imagine dancing to songs like “Turquoise Hexagon Sun” or “1969″ without being an anarchical extraterrestrial colonist at a commune orgy some 5,000 years in the future.

It’s approaching a decade since these Scottish electronica stalwarts have released a full album of new material, 2005′s The Campfire Headphase. By then they were already considered living legends, but the heyday of Richard D. Jamesian IDM was already a good five years out. So Boards of Canada drifted to the background for a while, releasing just one EP. Now they’re back, in 2013, and independent music has long since embraced maximalist dance music and 90s radio popstar reboots. The purist sentiment of “intelligent dance music” no longer means what it did at the end of the millenium. So how are we to take “Reach for the Dead?” What significance does it have in 2013?

Like other recent 90s cult comebacks (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, My Bloody Valentine, Daft Punk), Boards of Canada’s music sounds out of time and place. “Reach for the Dead” would have fit in well on any of Boards of Canada’s old albums, but that’s not to say it sounds old. “Reach for the Dead” has a dual tendency toward antiquated and futuristic; tapes hiss and crackle over some whirring synthetic drones, like an 8-track recording a transmission from a distant galaxy. Even the visuals that accompany the song–sand-swept desert and monolithic red-rock formations–suggest a martian planet. Though it doesn’t seem to evolve in its meandering five minutes, you have the feeling afterward that you somehow missed something about it–that the whole thing was some coded message requiring a subtle ear to decipher. However heavy-handed it may seem, the mysterious and labyrinthine marketing campaign for Tomorrow’s Harvest perfectly communicates what Boards of Canada is about, and has always been about.

Within hours of the debut of “Reach for the Dead,” a YouTube user had already reversed the song, seemingly without reason. But hearing the song in reverse offers an interesting commentary: “Reach for the Dead” is just as affecting and makes just as much sense emotionally going either way. There’s a strange symmetry to the song, an internal logic that only makes sense in its own world. As as result, “Reach for the Dead” sounds delicate as a spider-web but comes off as durable–so durable it holds up no matter how it’s stretched. By the end, “Reach for the Dead” is the thing doing the stretching; it manipulates not only your sense of time and place, but also identity. You become one of those faceless children on the cover of Music has the Right to Children. In 2013, lots of artists talk about being post-identity, post-gender, post-political, etc. But no band manages to incarnate that idea in the music itself better than Boards of Canada.