Polyphia release Be Not Afraid on 23 October and have moved their North American tour to early 2027.
Polyphia have announced their fifth album. Be Not Afraid arrives on 23 October through Rise Records, four years on from Remember That You Will Die, and the second single “Power In The Blood” is out now.
Finishing the record took longer than planned, and the consequence is a schedule change: the North American leg of the band’s world tour moves from this year into early 2027. European and UK dates are unaffected.
“Power In The Blood” was filmed inside the São Francisco da Penitência Church in Rio de Janeiro, with the band playing against its gold-leaf Baroque interior. Caleb Young directed.
The setting is of a piece with the record. The album’s title, the church, and a tracklist running from “Let There Be Light” through “Mark Of The Beast“, “Deny The Flesh” and “Devil Get Behind Me” to “Fear God” all pull from the same well; “Screwtape” takes its name from C.S. Lewis‘ The Screwtape Letters.
Sessions ran across Miami, Los Angeles and Dallas through 2024 and 2025, with RJ Pasin, Spiro Dussias, Tim Henson and Scott LePage sharing production.
Henson changed how he wrote, singing lines aloud first and working out how to play them afterwards. LePage said the bigger shift was that the four of them were in a room together from the start.
“We physically can’t make the same album twice,” he said. “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.”
Henson described the record as narrow and deep rather than broad.
“Instead of going wide on Be Not Afraid, we went as deep as we could,” he shared. “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.”
He said the album swings between two poles: “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.”
On where the title came from, he pointed at what the band were reading while they worked.
“During the making of this record, we went down some pretty dark rabbit holes. We kept coming across things that were so depraved they sounded insane when you said them out loud. Then some of the very things we had been talking about started appearing in documents released to the public. You can read that stuff and feel disgusted, demoralized, and completely powerless. Be Not Afraid is our response to that. Rather than allowing the ugliness of the world to paralyze us, we put everything we had into making something beautiful. We weren’t afraid of whether something was too different or whether people were going to understand it. We just followed what excited us and made what I believe is our best record to date,” Henson explained.
Henson did not specify which documents he meant.
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” appeared in June, the band’s first new music in more than four years, pairing their instrumental writing with dance production. CD copies of the album ship in November.
RJ Pasin supports every date worldwide. Perturbator joins the European and UK run in November and December, which goes ahead as scheduled. Ladrones support across North America in 2027, with Intervals added for the Toronto and Montreal shows.
Tickets already bought for the original North American dates remain valid for the rescheduled ones.
Polyphia formed in Texas in 2010 and are Henson and LePage on guitars, Clay Gober on bass and Clay Aeschliman on drums. Their previous four albums are Muse (2014), Renaissance (2016), New Levels New Devils (2018) and Remember That You Will Die (2022), the last of which topped Billboard‘s Top Hard Rock Albums chart, reached the top 40 of the Billboard 200, and featured Steve Vai, Chino Moreno, $not and Sophia Black.
