Scott LePage has just appeared on the screen but it’s a little hard to make small talk right now so soon after listening to Polyphia’s new album, Be Not Afraid, front-to-back.
Be Not Afraid is the sound of iconoclastic Texan instrumentalists at their most radical, most maximalist; it is the sound of LePage and his coconspirator, Tim Henson, sending the electric guitar through the post-modernist wormhole.
To experience it is not unlike doomscrolling on peyote, letting the biblical deluge of the information age pass unfiltered into the soft underbelly of your consciousness. Death by content. It was a mistake to consume this record so soon before conversation with others.
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Be Not Afraid might similarly be unsuitable to listen to when driving, or operating heavy machinery. It is not dinner party music. By the time Fear God brings the album to its conclusion, who can tell whether they are pre, post or perhaps mid-seizure?
LePage, who’s nursing a head cold and waiting for DayQuil’s recuperative dunt to kick in, knows the feeling, and he actually made the thing.
“Thanks, man. It’s, um… yeah, I kind of feel like that, too, after listening to it,” he says. “I just kind of go like, ‘Damn! That’s one hell of a thing I just heard.’ Not in a toot-my-own-horn way at all.”
Tim Henson has joined the chat. Henson and LePage have done more than most in recent years to radicalise quote/unquote guitar music, but now their betcha-can’t-play-this set-pieces have given way to a grander vision.
Be Not Afraid does not have lyrics per se, and yet it feels lyrical; it is strewn with samples, gospel preachers’ sermons set to jacking beats just as deep house producers in Detroit and Chicago did in the ‘90s – Polyphia’s own Can You Feel It? even borrows its title from Mr Fingers. Henson assures us there is a theme; there is a story running through the album.
“This is the first record that we’ve ever done that has had, like, actual deeper meaning beyond ‘look how crazy this thing is that we’re playing’ but, yeah, as far as it being lyrical, we are certainly telling a story through the samples,” he says.
The story isn’t that easy to describe. “Hence why we made the album,” shrugs Henson. But how it makes you feel – exhilarated, unclean, anxious, ecstatic, obsolete – is what’s more important. There’s something about these compositions that speaks to living in a time of digital excess, tech capture of our wants and desires, algorithms greedily documenting our every move, our feelings manipulated 24/7, nerves exposed.
Be Not Afraid reminds this writer of listening to Slayer’s Reign In Blood for the first time as a young teenager, on vinyl, on a Sunday night after band practice, and feeling as though some secret knowledge had been attained, a lapsarian moment after which nothing will be the same again.
“Real quick, I just wanted to touch on that, what you just said,” says Henson. “About it makes you feel like the first time, as a young person, hearing Reign In Blood. That right there is the feeling that we wanted to capture.
“For me in particular, like, I remember the first time that I heard Skrillex. I was, I don’t know, 12 or 13, and it just absolutely blew my mind, and that is exactly the feeling that we wanted people to have, to feel like a kid again, discovering something new, so yeah, I’m really stoked you said that.”
Yeah, but it’s not an altogether pleasant experience, and that’s by design. Be Not Afraid is a challenging work, a full-court press of electronic beats and digital processing. The “RJ Sauce,” ie, the co-production work from RJ Pasin, sends it over the top. This is the kind of aesthetic hyperbole that Paul Verhoeven would be proud off.
The song titles reference Christian theology and prayer. There is a song called J-BOMB. Jesus is on the cover, and is there, on record, in spirit. There is this constant seesawing between fleeting ecstasies and inevitable comedowns, the bliss of salvation and the brutality of damnation.
“I think that those two opposite ends of the spectrum were things that we really, really wanted to touch on,” says Henson. “Like, obviously, this album is a Jesus record. We have Jesus on the cover, every title is biblical. When you think about CCM, Christian Contemporary Music – this is not that by any means – but it feels super Rated G, and very family-friendly.
“They don’t touch on the actual issues. We are touching on those really, really dark aspects of the world. And that’s why we have these two opposing vibes on a record that just is constantly switching back and forth, like you’re just being torn from one thing to the other.”
Be Not Afraid all started with a gift, a weird-ass guitar a fan gave them during a VIP meet-and-great. It was made by the Japanese brand Seed and it had a super long-scale. LePage calls it “the negative five,” and as soon as he plugged it in and started playing, the ideas started coming.
This fan should know that his gift kick-started the album. “He was like, ‘I don’t know what to do with this, but I know you guys would know,’” says Henson.
LePage wrote Let There Be Light on the Seed. Henson ordered a second one and got to work, too. It gave them this foundational guitar sound from which everything else flowed. But all the travelling this Japanese-built guitar had done had not served it well. There was something wrong with it.
Henson puts it down to the “insanely long” scale length, but the neck started bowing, and not convexly as a normal neck would do. “It started bowing towards your face,” laughs Henson. “I don’t know how! The guitar became unplayable at a certain point. But while it was playable, it was a really cool guitar. It was actually kind of shreddy, and felt nice to play while it was working.”
They retired “the negative five” and realised they had a workaround in Ableton live, dropping the dry signal and “pitch-shifting the shit out of it”. That’s the warped faux eight-string you hear as Let There Be Light breaks the seal on your pre-Be Not Afraid life. Be not afraid, but there are more crazy guitar noises to come.
LePage is like Herbert West or Crawford Tillinghast, the mad scientists of low-budget horror summoning an evil into being that he barely knows how to control.
“Man, a couple of years ago, before I moved, I would sit in my room, and have a bottle of scotch next to me, and I would just tweak guitar tones, and try to just experiment with tone matching by myself,” says LePage. “So that’s kind of where the heavy stuff came from. And then the weird noises and stuff was just me being, like, ‘I wonder what a wah pedal would sound like with a guitar tone that is pitched down 17 semitones, and the EQ on the high-end of the spectrum is boosted to shit because of the low pitching, the compensation, and what would that sound like if I did that here?’”
And what does that sound like?
“It just gives you that gurgly, weird, hissy fucked-up sound,” he explains. “And it’s stuff like that, where you think, ‘What is the use case for something like that? Let me just experiment and try and see what happens.’”
Henson had the use case for that noise. It was one of those moments where what they put down on tape freaked both of them out when they heard it back through the studio monitors.
“There are a couple moments on the record that freak me out a little bit,” says LePage. “We were trying to come up with a transition from one song to another, and Tim, called me up, and he’s like, ‘Hey, uh, here’s the prompt: Can you make something that sounds like the devil throwing a tantrum?’ And I was like, ‘You know, I think I have access to enough freaky sounds on the guitar and whatever I have on the pedalboard today that I could make that sound.’”
Here’s the prompt, it’s like Henson speaks to LePage as though he’s an LLM. ScottGPT. But this is how they’ve always spoken to each other, pre-LLMs, pre-AI. Prompt isn’t the right word, they say, but it describes the collaborative process to a tee.
“If you think about Remember That You Will Die – and again, that is prior to ChatGPT, at least one year before actual large language models, or whatever those are came out – it was like, ‘Okay, what if Polyphia is the thing, the filter that whatever is ran through,’” Henson explains. “For example, our song ABC, it’s very much like a J-Pop/K-Pop song, but Polyphia, right? So it’s like, you run the J-pop/K-pop song through the Polyphia machine – which is us, a machine made of humans – and then out comes a song like ABC.”
The same goes for Playing God, Polyphia’s nylon-string bossa nova track that really did transform guitar, with the Ibanez nylon-strings in the video suddenly the hottest guitars on the market – and to think Henson had to persuade Ibanez that, yes, these were a good idea and people would buy them.
This was how Henson and LePage wrote their 2014 debut LP, Muse, listening to tracks on the radio that caught their ear and then asking themselves: ‘Okay, what is the Polyphia version of this?’ They make riffs for the chorus and consider the solos as verses and bridges.
So there were “prompts” as before. What made Be Not Afraid was the communal aspect, the fact that they got together in a rented Airbnb, away from all distractions, spitballing ideas, and in effect egging each other on to compose something more outré, to see how far they could push a sound that was – let’s face it – already pitched out there on the outer limits.
The real-time connection was critical, to the album’s energy, to the ideas.
“The way that this happened was I really wanted to base the sessions off of Kanye doing My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” says Henson. “He would basically fly everybody out to Hawaii and make everybody pull up to the studio wearing suits, and then he’d put rules on printed out on paper and taped to the wall, like, ‘No Twitter!’ No this, no that, just to create this super-sacred space for the creation.
“He would make everybody wake up at the same time and eat at the same time, work out at the same time, and then lock in on the music at the same time. And that’s essentially what we did.”
There was not Grand Theft Auto either. There was a sense of discipline, no fucking about. Between takes they shot hoops out back. That kept the blood flowing.
We are waking up at the same time. We are eating at the same time. We were playing basketball…
Tim Henson
“It was just us here,” says Henson. “We are waking up at the same time. We are eating at the same time. We were playing basketball… Grand Theft Auto is more of a pacifier, and basketball is more of an energiser. I think that really made this record super special because of – like you said – that communal aspect of just feeding off of each other, and to the point where we just ended up with a really insane-sounding record.”
There are no guests either. Henson had floated the possibility that System Of A Down frontman Serj Tankian would offer vocals. Japanese pop-metallers Babymetal were also on the list. Remember That You Will Die was full of guest appearances, with Steve Vai offering guest shred on Ego Death and Chino Moreno of Deftones also turning up on Bloodbath.
The aforementioned ABC featured Sophia Black. But Polyphia wanted this one to be just them. No guests. No distractions. Just LePage and Henson making body-horror out of guitar with Clay Gober on bass, Clay Aeschliman on drums.
“It’s like, ‘Well, all right, let’s just give them us, us in our most raw form,” says Henson. “And I say that loosely because the sound design on this record is so insane, and there are so many moments where it was just, like, ‘How can we make sounds that literally tear your mind apart?’”
Henson describes the approach to guitar as being like a vocalist tearing their vocal cords in a screamo band. The assaultive production then takes us places sonically where the guitar can’t go, as Be Not Afraid whipsaws between R&B and hip-hop and propulsive EDM. LePage presenting us with pitch-shifted metal riffs bent all out of shape.
A lot of these parts, I was thinking, ‘What would I do if I was a 17-year-old kid?’
Scott LePage
Some of these riffs were written in the same spirit of Polyphia’s 2013 EP, Inspire. “A lot of these parts, I was thinking, ‘What would I do if I was a 17-year-old kid?’ The riffs at the end of Can You Feel It?, I literally was thinking to myself, ‘What would I do if I was writing this for Inspire?’ And I started to go off those chord progressions.”
“Yeah, I think to add to that, the biggest driving force behind this record was fun, having fun and funmaxxing with our friends and ourselves,” says Henson. “What Scott’s saying and what you said at the beginning of this conversation about feeling like when you were younger, hearing Reign In Blood for the first time, it’s to capture that same feeling of being a kid.
“Every 14-year-old kid is, like, ‘The BC Rich with the sharp-as-fuck lines and the Line 6 insane tone, that’s cool as fuck!’ And it’s to capture the essence of what it’s like to be that kid again, where everything is just the most maximal that it could possibly be because that’s fucking cool. Our inner child – our inner children, were very happy during the making of this record.”
