Word by Simon Russell-White Out 28 August 2026 Loma Vista Recordings To say it’s been a turbulent half decade for Mastodon would be the ‘Motherload’ of all understatements, and since the release of Hushed and Grim (2021) a lot has changed for the Atlanta, Georgia natives. If you’re reading this, then it’s unequivocal proof you’re […]
The first band I caught on Sunday were Scotland’s Metal 2 The Masses winners Chekhov’s Gun. Having read accounts of them pre-Bloodstock, I was certainly intrigued about what I was about to witness, and they immediately grabbed the attention both in an aural, visual, and theatrical sense. With an initial dance sequence between the lead … Continue reading Festival Review: Bloodstock 2026 – Sunday (WeeG’s view)
Last year, caroline’s caroline 2 was our Album Of The Week. The British post-rock collective’s Magdalena Mclean has been releasing lovely music through her great side project Curbside Lambsear, and now Jasper Llewellyn is sharing solo music. His meditative, seven-minute debut single “For The Teacher” is out today via Rough Trade.
The personal tragedies that befell Neil Peart in 1997 looked likely to end Rush’s career. He lost his daughter in a car crash; then, just 10 months later, he lost his wife to cancer. Knowing she’d died of a broken heart, the drummer took off on his bike. He wrote a song and a book about his travels; then, finally returned to the Rush fold with Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson.
The result was 2002’s Vapor Trails – and while fans were delighted to welcome their heroes back, they were perhaps less delighted with the album. In 2010 guitarist Lifeson told Prog about the trio’s feelings on their work at the time.
“I’m not sure what kind of band we would have been if we hadn’t taken that time off. Who can tell? It was four years. but we certainly didn’t stop. I produced and did TV stuff – it was just that playing in Rush at that point wasn’t an option.
“Then, when we did reconvene for Vapor Trails, it became this most emotional and powerful record. We think very highly of that record, but there are things wrong with it. The way it sounds… it could have been better recorded. We would have done things in a different way. But I suppose we weren’t thinking straight – no, not that; it was just very raw, very visceral, you know?
“A lot of that stuff on there is first takes and demos, but because of what had happened and how we felt, we didn’t want to re-record. They felt too precious in a way. We were very protective of those songs at that time; we were all feeling very tender about it.
“Rich Chycki, my engineer, re-remixed One Little Victory and Earthshine for Retrospective III (2009) and they sounded just great. I’m not a big fan of those compilations, to be honest. They come and go; they’re contractual obligation things.
“But we’d all been feeling the same way about the sound of Vapor Trails. We’ve talked about revising the sound – we’ve talked about it a lot. I guess enough time’s passed now.
“I think we’re more curious than anything to see how it would sound. Now having heard what Rich has done with some of those songs too, it’s really made us think about it a lot more.”
Rumors continued to circulate until Rush confirmed the release of an updated Vapor Trails in 2013, remixed and remastered by David Bottrill. That year Prog declared the results to be “deeply satisfying” and worth the long wait.
“We now get an album with more definition (How It Is, The Stars Look Down and Sweet Miracle all reveal greater detail and warmth), with noticeably less clipping or distortion on the guitars (listening to heavyweight opener One Little Victory ceases to be an endurance test) and greater dynamic contrast on almost every track – less noise and more room for the music to breathe.
“During the instrumental breaks towards the end of Ceiling Unlimited, Rush came across as an ill-disciplined bar band, raucously battling each other to be heard. Now everything has its own space and suddenly what sounds suspiciously like a guitar solo appears, hopelessly submerged or completely missing formerly, adding an extra welcome bonus.
“Taken on its own merits, and in the context with their back catalogue… Vapor Trails emerges as a more nuanced and, fittingly, more human album than Rush fans may remember.”
Wrexham is gearing up to turn black and white this autumn as XS Wrexham and RainbowBiz CIC present NEW Metal Fest on Friday 25th and Saturday 26th September 2026, delivering two full days of the finest original underground UK heavy rock and metal. Curated by North East Wales Metal Productions – the team behind Metal … Continue reading NEW Metal Fest brings Ward XVI, Dystopian Sun, and top underground UK acts to XS Wrexham
Ziemba’s coming back with a bang. The multi-disciplinary artist releases her long-awaited new album The Braid this fall, and so far she’s shared the sprawling singles “The Perfect Rose” and “The Pleasure Seekers.” Today’s “We Implode” is a chirpy, inspiring triumph.
Polyphia will release their fifth studio album, Be Not Afraid, on October 23 via Rise Records — their first full-length in four years. The video for new single “Power In The Blood” is out now, filmed against the gold-leaf Baroque interior of the São Francisco da Penitência church in Rio de Janeiro. But there’s a second announcement buried in the same release that matters more if you’ve got tickets: getting the album right meant pushing the entire North American leg of the 2026 world tour into early 2027.
If you hold a ticket, read this bit before anything else.
North American dates are pushed to early 2027. The band say getting Be Not Afraid exactly where they wanted it meant giving it more time, and the tour moved to accommodate that.
European dates are unchanged — still November and December 2026.
Existing tickets are valid for the new dates. You don’t need to do anything.
Support-wise: RJ Pasin plays every date worldwide. North American shows feature Ladrones, with Intervals on select dates. Perturbator joins the entire European run.
That Perturbator billing is worth pausing on, incidentally. Polyphia and a French synthwave producer on the same stage should be an odd fit and absolutely isn’t — both operate in that space where electronic production and heavy guitar music stopped being separate things.
Full dates and tickets are at Polyphia.com.
LIVE & LOUD: Stream the World’s Hardest Radio Station 24/7
Look at the tracklist again
Here’s what nobody else covering this today is going to point out.
Read the twelve song titles in order:
Let There Be Light
With Eyes To See
Screwtape
Power In The Blood
They Know Not What They Do
Mark Of The Beast
Can You Feel It
Near Death
J-Bomb
Deny The Flesh
Devil Get Behind Me
Fear God
That is, almost front to back, scripture.
“Let There Be Light” is Genesis. “They Know Not What They Do” is Luke 23:34, spoken from the cross. “Mark Of The Beast” is Revelation. “Devil Get Behind Me” is Matthew 16:23. “Deny The Flesh” and “Fear God” are straight out of the same tradition. Even the album title — Be Not Afraid — is one of the most repeated phrases in the Bible.
“Screwtape” is the outlier and the most interesting one. That’s C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, a novel written as correspondence from a senior demon instructing his nephew on how to corrupt a man. And “Power In The Blood” is a real hymn, written by Lewis E. Jones in 1899.
The band haven’t spelled any of this out, so treat it as observation rather than gospel. But it lines up exactly with what Tim Henson has said the record is about: two worlds, two moods, one uplifting and triumphant, the other spine-chilling and terrifying. Good and evil as the organising principle.
Which also explains shooting the video inside a Baroque church.
For an instrumental band with no lyrics to lean on, building an entire thematic architecture out of song titles is a genuinely clever way to tell you what a record means.
Where it came from
Henson’s explanation of the album’s origin is the most striking thing in the announcement, and it’s worth handling carefully because he’s deliberately not naming what he’s talking about.
His account: during the making of the record, the band went down some dark rabbit holes. They kept encountering things so depraved they sounded insane said out loud. And then some of the very things they’d been discussing started appearing in documents released to the public. You can read that material, he says, and feel disgusted, demoralised and completely powerless.
Be Not Afraid is his stated response to that. Rather than let the ugliness of the world paralyse them, they put everything into making something beautiful.
He doesn’t say which documents and we’re not going to guess. But it reframes the title from a piece of religious imagery into something closer to an instruction to themselves.
His summary of the approach: instead of going wide, they went as deep as they could. Layers to pull back, something new every listen, and — his words — by far the most meaningful record they’ve ever made. He also says there are moments on it that legitimately scare him.
How they made it differently
Two process details that actually matter.
Henson changed how he writes. Rather than working out parts on the fretboard, he started singing lines aloud and then translating them onto guitar. That’s a significant shift for a player whose entire reputation is built on physically improbable guitar technique — writing melodically first and figuring out how to play it second, rather than letting what’s comfortable under the fingers dictate the melody.
The band wrote in the same room. Scott LePage explains that past Polyphia records were made by everyone gathering ideas separately and bringing them to each other afterwards. This time they treated the sessions as an opportunity to create with everybody present first. He calls it a communal approach, and says the fun they had making it was the magic being captured.
His other line is the one that explains this band’s whole career: they physically can’t make the same album twice, because they have a yearning to evolve.
The record was built across 2024 and 2025 in Miami, Los Angeles and Dallas with co-producer RJ Pasin and guitarist Spiro Dussias.
Be Not Afraid tracklist
Let There Be Light
With Eyes To See
Screwtape
Power In The Blood
They Know Not What They Do
Mark Of The Beast
Can You Feel It
Near Death
J-Bomb
Deny The Flesh
Devil Get Behind Me
Fear God
“Can You Feel It” arrived earlier this year as the band’s first single in over four years — a hybrid of metal and dance music that signalled where this was heading.
Sixteen years of refusing to sit still
For anyone who’s only encountered Polyphia through a guitar-playing clip on social media, the catalogue is worth knowing.
Formed in Plano, Texas in 2010, the lineup is Tim Henson and Scott LePage on guitars, Clay Gober on bass and Clay Aeschliman on drums. Four albums so far: Muse (2014), Renaissance (2016), New Levels New Devils (2018) and Remember That You Will Die (2022).
That last one debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Hard Rock Albums chart and cracked the Top 40 of the Billboard 200 — for a completely instrumental record. Guitar World readers voted it the best guitar album of 2022.
The guest list on it tells you everything about their position: pop singer Sophia Black, multiplatinum rapper $not, Steve Vai, and Deftones’ Chino Moreno — all on the same record, without it sounding like a compilation.
Rolling Stone described Henson as reinventing the instrument for more than a decade. He’s not far off. Polyphia occupy a genuinely strange space — too technical for pop, too melodic for the extreme end of the genre map, too electronic for prog purists — and they’ve turned that homelessness into an audience of hundreds of millions of streams.
The album: Be Not Afraid, out October 23, 2026 via Rise Records. Twelve tracks. Polyphia’s fifth studio album and first in four years.
The single: “Power In The Blood,” out now with a video directed by Caleb Young, filmed at the São Francisco da Penitência church in Rio de Janeiro.
The tour news: North American dates are pushed to early 2027 to give the album more time. European dates remain in November and December 2026. Existing tickets are valid for the new dates.
Support: RJ Pasin on all dates worldwide, Ladrones in North America with Intervals on select shows, Perturbator across Europe.
How it was made: recorded across 2024 and 2025 in Miami, LA and Dallas with co-producer RJ Pasin and guitarist Spiro Dussias. Tim Henson wrote by singing lines aloud before translating them to guitar.
The theme: Henson describes two extremes — one uplifting and triumphant, the other spine-chilling — and says some moments genuinely scare him.
FAQ
When is Polyphia’s new album released?
Be Not Afraid arrives October 23, 2026 via Rise Records. It’s the band’s fifth studio album and their first since 2022’s Remember That You Will Die.
What is the Be Not Afraid tracklist?
Twelve tracks: “Let There Be Light,” “With Eyes To See,” “Screwtape,” “Power In The Blood,” “They Know Not What They Do,” “Mark Of The Beast,” “Can You Feel It,” “Near Death,” “J-Bomb,” “Deny The Flesh,” “Devil Get Behind Me” and “Fear God.”
Why did Polyphia postpone their North American tour?
The band say getting Be Not Afraid exactly where they wanted it required more time, which meant moving the North American leg of the 2026 world tour into early 2027. European dates in November and December 2026 are unaffected, and tickets purchased for the original dates remain valid for the rescheduled shows.
Who is supporting Polyphia on tour?
RJ Pasin, who co-produced the album, appears on every date worldwide. North American shows feature Ladrones, with Intervals on select dates. Perturbator joins all European dates.
What is Be Not Afraid about?
Tim Henson has described the album as taking listeners through two extremes — one uplifting and triumphant, the other spine-chilling and terrifying — built around the polarity of good and evil. He has said the record was a response to dark material the band encountered while writing, and that rather than being paralysed by it they chose to make something beautiful instead.
Twelve tracks of scripture from a band with no lyrics, and a tour that just moved a year. Are you waiting it out, or hopping a flight to Europe? Tell us below. And keep it locked on the Loaded Radio stream — follow Loaded Radio for daily rock and metal news.
Word by Simon Russell-White Out 28 August 2026 Loma Vista Recordings To say it’s been a turbulent half decade for Mastodon would be the ‘Motherload’ of all understatements, and since the release of Hushed and Grim (2021) a lot has changed for the Atlanta, Georgia natives. If you’re reading this, then it’s unequivocal proof you’re […]
STREAM THE METAL BREAKDOWN DAILY NOW:
LIVE & LOUD: Stream the World’s Hardest Radio Station 24/7
