Today, the genre-defying instrumental rock innovators Polyphia announce their fifth full-length studio album BE NOT AFRAID out October 23rd with Rise Records.
With the news, the band also released their new single off the record “POWER IN THE BLOOD” with an accompanying music video you can watch HERE. Filmed in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, this video finds the band playing against the ornate, gold-leaf Baroque backdrops from the São Francisco da Penitência Church. The powerful visual lays the foundation for what’s to come off the new record, directed by Caleb Young.
Throughout 2024 and 2025, Polyphia worked together in various locations in Miami, Los Angeles and Dallas alongside co-producer RJ Pasin and guitar phenom Spiro Dussias. Guitarist Tim Henson took a different approach to composition, initially singing lines aloud and then translating them onto guitar, creating a process that encouraged the entire band to build on each other’s ideas in real time. More than anything, the sessions were defined by how much fun they were having creating music together. By the time the album was finished, they had reached a point where they could let go of any expectations about what would happen next and simply enjoy what they had created together.
“Instead of going wide on BE NOT AFRAID, we went as deep as we could,” Henson shares. “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.”
“We physically can’t make the same album twice,” adds guitarist Scott LePage. “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.”
The collective thread together a three-dimensional offering of otherworldly metal, future-facing prog, and pulsating house sealed tightly with carefully curated samples, inventive beat-craft, and the guitar eloquence that Tim and Scott remain renowned for. This time around, the instrumental push-and-pull invokes the polarity of the ultimate extremes: good and evil.
When speaking on the album Henson adds, “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.”
