Sydney melodic metalcore outfit Polaris return today armed with a ferocious new single and video Nightmare, taken from the group’s impending new album Fatalism, due out on September 1 via Resist Records in Australia and SharpTone Records for the rest of the world.
Featuring an equally ominous music video capturing the track’s dystopian themes, Nightmare also pays tribute to the recent devastating loss in the Polaris family, as drummer and lyricist Daniel Furnari explains: “We created this video with our friend Ben Wrigley, AKA Third Eye Visuals, who found some amazing locations and imagery to help us convey the track when paired with his brilliant editing skills. This was the second of three music videos we filmed with Ryan earlier this year. It has been a challenging and very emotional task to complete these videos in light of what has happened, but after careful discussion with his family we collectively felt that we wanted to share with the world the final things that Ryan created with us. We will proudly cherish the memories of him contained in this footage, and hope you will too.”
Following the release of Fatalism’s first single, Inhumane, Nightmare’s origins trace back to the album’s infancy, penned in 2022 during a week-long writing session in the Blue Mountains.
“Nightmare is a reflection on the constant state of fear that the world at large seems to have lived in for much of the past couple of years – the feeling of waking up every day into a dystopia of uncertainty and anxiety where nothing really feels safe anymore,” shares Furnari. “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 our collective dread was our greatest unifier. That concept then really helped to shape the thematic direction of the rest of the record.
“This was the second song that was written for the album,” Furnari continues, “and it started with that chorus melody, chords and lyrics, which I brought to the guys to build a song around. We fleshed it out on our first writing trip to the mountains and it developed into a very riff-heavy song, with the guitar being passed back and forth a lot between Rick and Ryan and all of us weighing in, so I think we all had an early attachment to it for that reason.”
