Polyphia guitarist Tim Henson has some explaining to do when he talks to MusicRadar about his band’s new album, Be Not Afraid.
Last year, Henson intimated that this album would feature guest appearances from System Of A Down frontman Serj Tankian and Japanese pop-metallers Babymetal.
But once you play Be Not Afraid front to back, once your ear has surfed its breakneck changes between Polyphia at their most apocalyptic and most ecstatic, and your brain has processed this information as best it can, you’ll realise there are no guests.
Henson shrugs: “Yeah, well that came from our last record [2022’s Remember That You Will Die]. Half of the tracks on it had guests, and I know there’s a large portion of our listeners that really only fuck with half of the record, because the other half is different genres of vocalists.”
Previously, Polyphia had operated an open-doors policy when inviting guest musicians to collaborate on their recordings. Over the years, the Texan instrumentalists have drafted the likes of Yvette Young, Mateus Asato and Ichika Nito as pinch-hitters on guitar.
Early recordings featured stunt shred from Jason Richardson, Aaron Marshall and Jakub Żytecki, as Henson and fellow guitarist Scott LePage shuffled through their contacts book to seek out complementary talents – players whose style could be subsumed into their radically unorthodox whole. Virtuosity is the common thread.
Remember That You Will Die featured a cast of guest vocalists. Chino Moreno appeared on Bloodbath. Pop/R&B vocalist Sophia Black starred on ABC. Killstation, $NOT and Lil West brought the rhythm, and, most famously, Steve Vai brought his own brand of electric guitar genius to Ego Death.
A little help goes a long way when you’re taking progressive metal guitar, math-rock, hip-hop and R&B and EDM experimentalism through the looking glass.
But as Henson says, this time around they decided: “Let’s just give them us – us in our most raw form, and I say that loosely because the sound design on this record is so insane.”
Henson is not not exaggerating either. Be Not Afraid is the sound of Polyphia everythingmaxxing, splicing together those preacher samples so loved by Chicago and Detroit house producers with extended-range metal guitar riffs, pitch-shifted into glitchy squawks, setting all this to jacking beats. There is just so much sound.
“There are so many moments where it was just, like, ‘How can we make sounds that literally tear your mind apart?’” says Henson. “But in an effort to express raw emotion, it’s like the equivalent of tearing your vocal cords as a screamer in a screamo band, I guess, but on guitar.”
Henson says going all-in with a maximalist production allowed them to take their sound places their guitars couldn’t go.
“The sound of you literally snapping your string isn’t pleasant, and you can’t really do anything musical with that, so let’s use sound design to kind of express that same raw emotion,” he says. “That’s the thing.”
But then then the guitars are pretty nuts, too, with Scott LePage putting together a rhythm part that sounds like “the devil throwing a tantrum” and spending hours nursing a Scotch while putting together some of the wildest tones he can imagine.
So yeah, no guests might be a change of pace but Be Not Afraid is still the sound of Polyphia taking guitar to the frontier. Who knows how they're going to recreate this live when, but it's Scott LePage told us in 2022, “There is a small aspect of, ‘Okay, this needs to be performable.’ But sometimes we just do cool shit for the sake of doing cool shit and worry about it later.”
You can read all about the making of Polyphia's Be No Afraid in full, coming soon to MusicRadar.
- Be Not Afraid is available to preorder via Rise.
