Polaris drummer Daniel Furnari guides us track by track through their latest record ‘Fatalism’, out now via Sharptone Records.
HARBINGER
“We’ve always aimed to start each of our records a little differently to each other, but figuring out exactly how to do that is something that often doesn’t happen until fairly late in the process. There’s usually a lot of head-scratching until one day the answer presents itself. We’ve always loved the idea of having an opening track that can stand on its own, but also acts as a prelude that directly sets up and leads into the next song, so we were really excited when we saw we might be able to achieve that here. Ryan had programmed a beat and some root notes in a rumbling bass synth, and although it was pretty raw I saw some potential in it and built a structure with a simple vocal melody.“
“When I took it to Rick and Jake, they fleshed out my very basic guitar ideas, and Rick went to town on layers and further programming. I think we all love the way the song develops, the way it’s built around just a couple of simple ideas that cycle, building in intensity each time, and there’s something about the simplicity of the huge wall of droning guitars in the third verse that feels really satisfying. We were thinking kind of nostalgically about how our favourite rock and post-hardcore bands of the early 2000s opened their records, or how we imagined they might start a record today, and I think we managed to create something that accomplished our goal of a ‘big-scale”’opening track. ‘Harbinger’ introduces the record with the acknowledgement that our lives and our world seem to have fallen into disorder, that there is something deeply amiss and we are at risk of self-destructing. There’s a melancholy but also a feeling of foreboding to the track, an idea of an impending doom which carries through the whole record.”
NIGHTMARE
“Following on from the sense of trepidation and unease expressed in ‘Harbinger’, ‘Nightmare’ confronts that fear head-on, reflecting on the constant state of panic that the majority of the world seems to have lived in for much of the past couple of years; the feeling of waking up every day in a dystopian, highly conflicted society where nothing really feels safe anymore. The more I thought about it, the more I arrived at the conclusion that maybe this fear was the biggest thing we all had in common during a time of such great division – that no matter what side of all these conflicts you stood on, the potential outcomes looked dire, and that maybe this collective dread was the one thing we could relate to each other on. That concept then really helped to shape the thematic direction of the rest of the record.“
“From memory I think this was the second song that was written for the album, and it began with that chorus melody, chords and lyrics, which I brought to the boys to build a song around. We fleshed it out on our first writing trip to the Blue Mountains and it developed into a very riff-heavy song, with the guitar being passed back and forth a lot between Rick & Ryan and all of us weighing in, so I think we all had an early attachment to it for that reason. This song was also the catalyst for us to introduce a new set of guitars in a new tuning (bad news for our oversized-baggage-budget on tour flights, but great for writing…), which was something we’d been talking about doing for a while. Once we figured out the optimal key for this song, we realised it would work best on a guitar tuned to our variant of Drop G, so having that that option on the table then led to the writing of ‘Harbinger’, ‘Inhumane’, ‘Fault Line’ and ‘All In Vain’. We’ve joked that ‘Nightmare’ might be musically ‘the most-Polaris track that Polaris has ever written’, and I think a few people have shared that sentiment – it seems to encapsulate a lot of our strengths and tendencies in a song.”
PARASITES
“We’ve started to notice a pattern where the first song that Rick writes for every record seems to end up being something abrasive and in-your-face, with a lot of dirty guitar sounds and chromaticism, and relentless drums – on the first album it was ‘Frailty’, on LP2 it was ‘Hypermania’, and now we have ‘Parasites’. It seems to be something he needs to get out of his system to get started on a record, and it hasn’t failed us yet! Nobody in the band (or the audience) gets a break in this song – it’s pretty much balls-to-the-wall all the way through, especially for me, with some of the album’s gnarliest and most challenging drum parts. A song this aggressive needed subject matter to match, and I think the lyrics for this one were taking shape right around the time I had started to reach my limit with a lot of the stuff I was reading online. It felt to me that everyone’s opinions had become their own personal religion, hearsay was replacing fact, the concepts of research and expertise were dead in the water.”
“For a lot of people, I think the act of just pushing against whatever they perceive to be the ‘status quo’ has become more important than being able to back that up with facts, and we see a lot of people happy to jump on a soapbox and preach something contrarian without every having to face the real-world consequences of that. While the song contains a lot of what might understandably be perceived as self-righteous anger, in the process of writing it I had to look in the mirror and realise that I had been guilty of some of these things myself to a degree – proselytizing things I wasn’t fully informed on or getting into arguments about things I hadn’t critically researched – so I don’t really exempt myself from it at all.”
OVERFLOW
“This track came into existence on our second writing retreat, when we were on a bit of a roll after writing ‘Inhumane’. We were pretty deep into the album process at this point, and I think this was actually the final track to be written that made it onto the record. Jake had been pumping out simple chord sequences in an effort to break away from the busier, riffier stuff we’d been writing, and Ryan came in with this super catchy sliding lead over the top, which became the basis for the chorus and the central motif of the song. I think my favourite part of this song is the direction the second verse takes, particularly when it picks up the energy for a moment.“
“Rick wrote this verse development that really leaned into the sound of bands like Basement and Balance & Composure, which we both love, so it’s always satisfying when we find a way to somehow incorporate that alongside the heavier stuff that we more regularly do. Finding a way to get a big heavy section into this song without it feeling out of place was also a challenge and I love that we managed to shape this combination of sliding powerchord accents, crazy programming and bass & drum moments into a type of breakdown we hadn’t accomplished before. I feel like the meaning of the song is fairly self explanatory, and I think a lot of people will naturally interpret it through the lens of their own experiences, but essentially for me it’s about the struggle of fighting off a panic attack and the impact of that struggle on others. ‘I am not what I think, I am not what I feel.'”
WITH REGARDS
“‘With Regards’ imagines a disintegrating relationship between two very old friends. In it, the narrator is saying goodbye to someone that used to be important to them, who has burned bridges with the people they love and chosen a destructive path that the narrator can no longer condone, or even bear witness to. In cutting this relationship off, they find themselves actually mourning their friend, as they start to accept that the version of them that they knew will soon be ‘dead to them’. This song tries to capture the strange mix of warring emotions that results from missing someone, while at the same time recognising that they have no place in your life anymore. When we finished the song we realised the lyrics of Jake’s singing parts represent the more empathetic side of that conflict, whereas Jamie’s parts mostly represent the colder side of anger and resentment, but it’s really a coincidence that the parts happened to split up that way.”
“The lyrical direction came purely from the chorus, which was once again the seed idea for the rest of the song. There’s a strong element of that melancholy nostalgia to it – something about the chorus reminds me of my childhood in a way I can’t explain, almost like a lullaby, and I think that played in subconsciously to the story we told. The words that came to me with the melody, but it was quite difficult to finish as it wasn’t something I could truly relate to an experience in my own life. I feel fortunate that I can say I have never really had to cut someone out and actively distance myself from them, but when we started discussing the song, it became apparent that sadly most of the boys had had various experiences with people in their lives that had parallels to this song. All of those stories contributed to shaping the completed lyrics, and I still feel the song really deeply. It’s a heartbreaking track, and a personal favourite. Musically we tend to look at this one as a little bit of a ‘throwback’ track for us, harkening back a bit more to some of the tendencies of our ‘The Guilt & The Grief’ EP and our first album, so I’m particularly excited for the long-time listeners to hear this one.”
INHUMANE
“This is a rare track for us in that it was largely written chronologically – we usually tend to jump around a lot in the structure of the song, writing different parts, but this one was mostly written start to finish aside from the breakdown, which was workshopped a lot. I had programmed out the basis for the intro bass loop and a primitive version of the main riff/chorus, which Rick and Jake then spiced up a lot, really taking advantage of the low G tuning, and the song progressed from there. We grew up when nu-metal was still at the forefront of heavy music and we wanted to kind of capture some of the darkness of KoRn and the bounce of Limp Bizkit in this track – I still believe that those bands and the tempos & grooves they gravitated to had a very special way of making a crowd move. ‘Inhumane’ reflects on the way we have become increasingly desensitised to violence, tragedy and bad news happening on a daily basis, to the point where we become totally indifferent to it and begin to turn a blind eye. Rising death tolls, mass unrest, horrific scenes on the streets and in hospitals… When you’re facing a constant barrage of horrible news coming from every corner, eventually you reach a point where the initial shock and sadness wear off and you find yourself becoming 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 I suppose, 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 just to feel human.”
THE CROSSFIRE
“The lyrics for ‘The Crossfire’ were a tough one to crack – the opening lines and first verse came easily but a lot of the rest of the song remained untouched vocally for a long while. What evolved from those early lyrics (which did hold up over time in the end), was an expression of frustration at the feeling of powerlessness for an individual to change anything that really matters in the world. Watching history repeat itself as people continue to mistreat each other and deny the mistakes of the past. Being caught in the middle of both metaphorical and literal battles that often seem at first to have little to do with you, yet still being expected to be on the right side of history; To be the change that you want to see but also to not rock the boat too much, not make too much noise… There seems to be no winning. Musically this one is a bit of a melting pot and I’m still amazed by how Rick got all these ideas to work together – there’s a brightness and a hopefulness to the melodies, but they’re juxtaposed with a lot of tension. There are thick single-note groves alongside really jagged early-metalcore riffs. We were stuck on the chorus melody of this song for probably the longest time of any song on the album – I couldn’t count the hours spent staring at a screen and tapping out melodies on the midi keyboard, or the number of ideas that built up in the “melody graveyard”. In the end it was our buddy Shawn Mayer, a producer from Sydney and a close friend of the band who joined us in the studio in December to throw some ideas around, who got it over the line. It ended up being so much more anthemic than what we had been imagining.”
DISSIPATE
“I’d say this is the main contender for the heaviest song on the record, and is probably up there one of the heaviest we’ve ever written. The machine-gun chugs and kick-work in the intro, middle verse and outro of the song have definitely given us a kick up the ass in rehearsals! Rick was determined to keep as much of the guitar work to chug-based-riffing as he possibly could, and also to make the most of that main recurring lead idea, which we layered with a pretty aggressive synth to really drive it home. There wasn’t really a specific story or event that inspired the lyrics of this song, but it comes from a place of feeling as though you are struggling and suffering in a way that you can’t seem to explain to the world or to your loved ones. Feeling that you are carrying an invisible burden that no one else can see, seeking comfort in the wrong places, and longing for someone or something to take the weight. “I can’t outrun my fate, it follows like a shadow / I put all of my faith in a saint without a halo”.”
AFTERTOUCH
“‘Aftertouch’ tells a story of two people who are both battling their internal demons in such a way that they aren’t able to properly be there for each other, and slowly begin to lose each other as they lose themselves. It’s about the way anxiety, depression and the stresses of life can drive a wedge between people who still care deeply about each other. I witnessed a lot of people going through major changes in their lives, relationships crumbling under the pressures of day-to-day life in the current social climate and the accompanying mental health strains. People growing irreparably apart due to being forced so close together. I kind of allowed myself to inhabit those stories and characters and write something from another perspective to my own, while still drawing from my own experiences. Softer, more vulnerable tracks like this tend to be the most challenging for Jake and Jamie, and they both put some painstaking hours in to get across the right level of emotion.“
“The demo for ‘Aftertouch’ came together very quickly just between Ryan and I, with mostly his ideas and just a little guidance from me – he had written the first verse and initial chorus idea, and we sent the file back and forth, me describing verbally what I imagined might happen next and him somehow nailing it each time. I guess we were just very in sync that day. That haunting keyboard/bell motif that comes in halfway through the song and then kinda takes over is one of my favourite things on the album, and I love the way the song builds in intensity with each repeat of the core ideas, up to that climax at the end. Ryan didn’t often write songs from start to finish – more often he would start an idea that we would turn into a complete song, or write over around and over the top of things that we had written. For that reason, this song and the short 24 hours of inspiration that birthed it feel particularly special.”
FAULT LINE
“Although it’s late in the album, ‘Fault Line’ arrived quite early in the process. I think we all hear different influences in this one – for me, the intro and first verse have elements of mid- 00’s In Flames, with a little touch of Breaking Benjamin also mixed into the intro riff. The bridge in this track was a late addition suggested by Jamie that we were very grateful for, as it gave the song an emotional climax that it didn’t originally have. Recalling the opening track ‘Harbinger’s sense of impending doom, ‘Fault Line’ and ‘All In Vain’ as a pair form the other bookend of the album – a warning of the consequences of living the way that we have been and of the dangers of biding our time, and an expression of a futile desire to escape our collective fate.”
ALL IN VAIN
“Like our opening tracks, we usually instinctively know a closer when we find one. As the songs took form it became impossible to imagine this track going anywhere else in the record. There’s some juicy stuff going on rhythmically in the intro and the bridge – it’s been a while since we’ve played around with odd time signatures. Somewhat by accident I believe, Rick wrote this cycling guitar part that we realised was in 15/8 time, which felt really tense and suspenseful. It was a challenge for me to get the drums to groove comfortably within that metre in the bridge – I went through a lot of variations trying to write the part, and a lot of takes in the studio to nail it. I was trying to channel some Karnivool, thinking about Steve Judd’s approach to irregular rhythms. There’s a bleak existentialism in this song, a sort of nihilism. Our existence is the only thing we know for certain, and yet in a very real sense it is inherently meaningless, temporary and inconsequential outside of the sphere we occupy. We create grand narratives around our lives, worship hollow idols and attach meaning to objects, experiences, people and interactions; partly because that’s the way we are wired, but also because otherwise we are not truly living, merely surviving. One day in the not-so-distant future, none of it will matter or be remembered. “Our lives are not much more than a metaphor.””
Polaris’ ‘Fatalism’ is out now via SharpTone Records.
