Photo by Third Eye Visuals
Fear: humanity’s great divider, but also its most potent unifier. It’s this very notion that lies at the beating core of Polaris’s third album Fatalism; a record shaped by the sense of despair and dystopia that engulfed the world over the past few years, and the overwhelming accompanying sensation that we were powerless to change course.
Due out on September 1 via Resist Records in Australia and SharpTone Records for the rest of the world, Fatalism features brand new single, Inhumane, accompanied by the band’s most ambitious and goriest music videos to date.
“Inhumane reflects on the feeling of growing desensitized to death, violence and tragedy due to overexposure.” explains drummer and one of the main songwriters, Daniel Furnari. “I think for a lot of people over the last few years, when you’re facing a constant barrage of horrible news coming from every corner on a literal daily basis, eventually you reach a point where the initial shock and sadness wear off and you find yourself becoming almost numb to it. It’s like a subconscious defense mechanism – when caring too much becomes too taxing, we stop caring at all. That hollow feeling, or lack of feeling, can come with a lot of guilt, making you question whether your empathy and your humanity have been erased, and in a strange way almost wishing you could feel that pang of fear or sadness again.”
“The music video for Inhumane, conceived by our director Ed Reiss, takes that concept to a fantastical extreme, and features us falling through the floors of a collapsing apartment building, to find that new horrors (literally) await us on each level…It’s one of the wackiest (and bloodiest) ideas we’ve ever put on screen and I’m still kind of in disbelief that it came together!” he adds.
The writing process wasn’t, however, without its challenges. With COVID forcing the band off the road after a headline tour in support of The Death Of Me, the Sydney quintet responded the only way they knew how: writing more music, albeit remotely on Zoom. it wasn’t until lockdowns eased in 2022 and they relocated to the Blue Mountains for a week of writing that the creative dam finally burst. Shortly after returning from an overseas headlining run in 2022 – Polaris’s first chance to tour The Death Of Me internationally, the recording process began in Melbourne over a period of five months with the band’s live sound engineer Lance Prenc (who also co-produced the album with the band, mixed and mastered Fatalism) and vocal recording duties were handled by Alpha Wolf guitarist, Scottie Simpson.
“For us, fatalism is the resignation to the idea that you have no control over certain things, that some things are almost pre-determined and inevitable” Furnari concludes, “which seems like a negative and almost fearful notion. But one of the reasons I was drawn to it as a concept and as an album title was that there’s almost a freedom in that idea too. Once you can accept that there are certain things you simply can’t control – it’s actually very liberating.”
“We want people to feel a sense of connection to something outside of themselves when they hear this album. There’s a certain peace that comes with accepting that there are some things larger than yourself and redirecting that fear.”
Polaris have already firmly established their place as a fixture in the Australian heavy landscape via their first two albums, the ARIA-nominated The Death Of Me and 2017’s The Mortal Coil, which debuted in the Australian Top 10. They have been awarded a laundry list of accolades, album of the year mentions in end of year lists, sold-out countless headline tours of Australia and have toured across the globe. Not to mention performing at Download Festival, Unify Gathering in Australia, headlining Knight & Day Festival and most recently performing the 2022 Good Things Festival headlined by Bring Me The Horizon.
Polaris will be heading to Europe in June to perform at European Summer Festivals such as Rock For People, Download Festival, Graspop, Jera On Air, Full Force, Vainstream Rockfest as well as a string of headline shows supported by Chelsea Grin and Kublai Khan TX. Stay tuned for more Polaris news.
JUN 8 @ Rock For People (Hradec, Czechia)
JUN 14 @ Mau Club (Rostock, Germany) *
JUN 15 @ Moderness (Bremen, Germany) *
JUN 17 @ Kulturhaus Stattbahnhof (Schweinfurt, Germany) +
JUN 18 @ Graspop (Dessel, Belgium)
JUN 19 @ Laiterie (Strasbourg, France) #
JUN 20 @ Ninkasi Kao (Lyon, France) #
JUN 22 @ Jera On Air (Ysselsteyn, Netherlands)
JUN 23 @ Full Force (Gräfenhainichen, Germany)
JUN 24 @ Vainstream Rockfest (Münster, Germany)
JUN 25 @ Saarbrucken, Germany +
JUN 26 @ Munich, Germany +
JUN 27 @ Karlsruhe, Germany +
JUN 28 @ Hamburg, Germany +
* w/ The Amity Affliction, Paledusk
# w/ Motionless In White, Lorna Shore, The Amity Affliction
+ w/ Chelsea Grin
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