Instrumental progressive music and chart success rarely go hand in hand, but Texan quartet Polyphia have managed to make it work. After dropping in July last year, their EP The Most Hated reached #41 on Billboard’s Top 200 chart – although as that release’s title suggests, not everyone in the prog sphere would approve of their willingness to embrace influences that lie far outside their home territory. After naturally finding themselves welcome back in 2013, thanks to the djent-oriented extended player Inspire, Polyphia started to stretch their abilities in more accessible directions, and promptly found themselves rejected by metal fans unwilling to accept any pop-savvy band, no matter how impressive they might be as musicians.
Having weathered the troll-storms that greeted experimental records Muse and Renaissance, Polyphia have returned with New Levels New Devils – an album firmly distanced from Inspire, but also dark and heavy in its own way.
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“I think we’ve come a long way since then,” says bassist Clay Gober as he reflects on Polyphia’s earliest material. “When I think back to that, I think about sitting in [guitarist Tim Henson’s] old room, and us talking about how we needed to drop out of school because we had to write an EP called Inspire. I think of being a fucking little baby, to be honest."
Does he see Inspire as a relatively immature release?
“Oh yeah, totally. It was five years ago. Feels like a lifetime ago now. It would be embarrassing if we found one thing to do and stuck to that. We probably wouldn’t be that fucking good if we were making the same record over and over instead of trying new things.”
“The music we’re making is not anything that [already] exists; it’s us trying to create a hybrid of all this bullshit we listen to,” Gober continues. “It’s like shooting yourself in the foot to take inspiration from the actual field that you’re playing in. I’d like to be in a band that anyone can go see or listen to.”
And you want more girls at your shows?
“My man! When you go on tour with various bands, you’re gonna see more girls, which is a ratio we’re ever trying to increase at our shows. Trying to make it so some of the chicks you see at our shows aren’t just other dudes’ girlfriends.”
Given how diverse Polyphia’s back catalogue is, they’re capable of achieving that goal while doing whatever the hell they want. “The range of inspiration changes accordingly; for Inspire we were listening to Tesseract, and we’ve really been leaning toward hip-hop and R&B music ever since,” Gober says. “I don’t think anyone listens to Drake that much on the tour bus anymore – his new album was really bad. You should check out our new album…”
Rest assured: New Levels New Devils sounds nothing like Drake. “We just wanted to make a scary, sick-ass record, a record that was so hard-hitting that it was haunting, almost,” Gober asserts. “Like how hard it goes off on the drops, and how wicked the riffs are. So that’s what we were going for with this one, and I think we succeeded.”
“Why are the songs getting darker and angrier? Maybe we’ve played so much Radio Disney shit, at least one [song] on each album in the past, like “James Franco” on the first record, and we just wanted to make a nasty, rated R album. As opposed to making songs called “Sweet Tea” and fucking “James Franco” and all this shit.”
“We even managed to make a video [for “40oz”, from The Most Hated] with a bunch of grandmas eating pot cookies, and it’s like…not this time! We’re gonna make scary shit that makes people question themselves,” Gober laughs. “We’ve never really been dark before. So we’re saying stuff we haven’t really said before, at least not to the extent that we are [now].”
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3o-l1LVNgw[/youtube]
Although Polyphia’s next creative move is impossible to predict (“We’re not going to be the same people then; we’re not even the same people now as we were when we wrote New Levels New Devils”), Gober’s therapeutic music of choice is currently “the new All Them Witches record, ATW. They sound like Black Sabbath, and that’s been my jam non-stop. I’m into whatever poses an internal question to me that I find intriguing or disturbing.”
With so much uncertainty ahead, a certain amount of anxiety, stress, and self-searching is unavoidable – even though Polyphia’s future looks more promising than ever before. “The anticipation of everything we have going is quite a distraction. Trying not to become overwhelmed by the whole thing at hand, trying to keep my fucking cool.”
Gober still has his sense of humor, prescribing masturbation as a cure-all for writer’s block (“When in doubt, wank it out!”), but it’s clear that behind the jokes, Polyphia see their work as serious business. 26 of 32 headline shows sold out last year, and as Gober says, “[Headlining is] a lot to take in. We’ve always been very scared to headline, just because of the magnitude of the part that you’re playing. But when you’re on the brink of shit that is that serious to people, your fans, you can’t help but feel grounded.”
Humility, authenticity, and appreciation are all core Polyphia characteristics in 2018. Pushed to recall strange touring scenarios, Gober relates a night spent “playing for 2,000 people, on tour with Coheed and Cambria in 2016,” and later declares that “face to face interactions are all we really have at the end of the day. The internet is one thing, but it’s a treat for us to hang out in person [with fans at shows], and meet the people who’ve helped us get this thing off the ground.”
What about your ultimate ambition? “Headline over Metallica!” Gober half-laughs, before turning serious once more. “Helping impact other people’s lives in a good way. It’s visceral, you know? I want our music to impact people the way a lot of shit impacted me.”
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHcAi2FPrTM[/youtube]
