“By far the most meaningful record we’ve ever made”: Polyphia announce new album Be Not Afraid – listen to the first single now
Polyphia has announced their new album, Be Not Afraid, which will be released later this year. The band has not put out a studio album since 2022’s Remember That You Will Die and spent the last two years heading down “pretty dark rabbit holes” to come up with material for their fifth release.
The album announcement also saw the release of lead single, Power in the Blood. Polyphia worked on the album throughout 2024 and 2025 in Miami, Los Angeles, and Dallas.
READ MORE: Neural DSP makes “the biggest CorOS update in the company’s history”
Guitarist Tim Henson confirmed the composition of the album changed massively, initially singing lines out loud and then translating them to guitar. He said: “Instead of going wide on Be Not Afraid, we went as deep as we could. There are so many layers to pull back. Every time you listen to it, you’ll notice something new. Thematically, it’s by far the most meaningful record we’ve ever made.”
Guitarist Scott LePage added: “We physically can’t make the same album twice. We have a yearning to evolve. It was so much fun to write this one together too – the writing sessions for past Polyphia records typically looked like us gathering our ideas separately first and bringing them to each other second, so we took a different approach with Be Not Afraid by treating the sessions like an opportunity to create with everybody in the room first before getting into the separate writing.
“It was a much more communal approach that led to us having so much fun making it that the fun itself was the magic being captured.”
Henson added: “The album takes you through the extremes of two different worlds / moods: one being very uplifting and triumphant, the other being spine-chilling and terrifying. There are moments on the record that legitimately scare me when I listen to them.”
Tim Henson, who has been in the band since its founding in 2010, added that the band headed into darker territory and is their response to feeling “disgusted, demoralised, and completely powerless”.
He said: “During the making of this record, we went down some pretty dark rabbit holes. We kept coming across things that were so depraved they sounded insane when you said them out loud. Then some of the very things we had been talking about started appearing in documents released to the public. You can read that stuff and feel disgusted, demoralised, and completely powerless.
“Be Not Afraid is our response to that. Rather than allowing the ugliness of the world to paralyse us, we put everything we had into making something beautiful. We weren’t afraid of whether something was too different or whether people were going to understand it. We just followed what excited us and made what I believe is our best record to date.”
Dates for the band’s European tour, which starts on November 17 at the Halle 622 in Zurich, can be found below:
Nov 18 – Zurich, CH – Halle 622
Nov 19 – Lyon, FR – Le Radiant
Nov 20 – Toulouse, FR – Interference
Nov 22 – Barcelona, ES – Razzmatazz
Nov 23 – Madrid, ES – Sala La Riviera
Nov 25 – Milan, IT – Alcatraz
Nov 27 – Munich, DE – Zenith
Nov 28 – Prague, CZ – SaSaZu
Nov 29 – Warsaw, PL – Progresja
Nov 30 – Leipzig, DE – Haus Auensee
Dec 2 – Hamburg, DE – Docks
Dec 4 – Copenhagen, DK – Amager Bio
Dec 5 – Berlin, DE – Tempodrom
Dec 6 – Oberhausen, DE – Turbinenhalle
Dec 7 – Brussels, BE – Ancienne Belgique
Dec 8 – Amsterdam, NL – AFAS Live
Dec 9 – Paris, FR – Zenith Paris
Dec 11 – Birmingham, UK – O2 Academy Birmingham
Dec 12 – Manchester, UK – Manchester Academy
Dec 15 – Leeds, UK – O2 Academy Leeds
Dec 16 – London, UK – O2 Academy Brixton
Learn more at Polyphia’s official website.
The post “By far the most meaningful record we’ve ever made”: Polyphia announce new album Be Not Afraid – listen to the first single now appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
