Polyphia's 'Be Not Afraid' Is a Jesus Record Built on Anger

Polyphia released their new album, Be Not Afraid, after taking off most of 2024 and all of 2025 from touring — a four-year gap since 2022's Remember That You Will Die. Guitarists Tim Henson and Scott LePage told Rolling Stone the record is their heaviest yet, framed entirely around biblical song titles and a Jesus figure on the cover.

The album's intensity has a specific source. Henson said the band modeled their sessions on Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy recordings — shared wake-up times, shared meals, shared workouts, weeks-long camps in Miami, Los Angeles and Texas. During those sessions, he said, the band discussed "the nitty-gritty details of all the super heinous, horrendous things that came out in a certain set of files this year."

"It is a Jesus record. We put Jesus on the cover. Every song title is biblical," Henson said. "And because every song title is biblical, it's just layered with meaning, both metaphorical and literal."

Why did the album take four years?

Remember That You Will Die arrived in 2022; the band spent 2022 and 2023 touring and demoing. The opening track, "Let There Be Light," was the first song started for the album, around the end of 2023 going into 2024.

Henson framed the long cycle as deliberate: the band's previous album before Remember That You Will Die, New Levels, came out in 2018. "We're slowly but surely trying to train our fan base to not expect music [sooner than] every four years. Hopefully five — maybe 12, like Tool!" he said. "You gotta give us time to cook."

What does the record sound like?

Henson compared "Let There Be Light" to the band's 2018 track "G.O.A.T." and "Fear God" to 2022's "Ego Death." The other 10 songs, he said, resemble nothing in their discography. Overt metal nods are more prominent than usual.

The rhythm section — bassist Clay Gober and drummer Clay Aeschliman — records last, playing demos as they would live. Henson addressed the common criticism that the band sounds programmed: "Everything that you're hearing was played by a human. That's the beauty of sound design." He added: "It's done by humans, and it sounds nothing like humans."

Demos use sampled beats and, in Henson's words, "copy-pasting a million hi-hats in a row" — speed programming that let songs like "Can You Feel It" and "With Eyes to See" be born in a single day.

Where do the riffs come from?

LePage said the grinding drop in "Mark of the Beast" at 1:04 came from a TikTok beat. He also cited a Charli XCX song featuring Billie Eilish as a trigger: "Imagine fucking Meshuggah guitar on that shit following those quarter notes." His reference point for that kind of transformation is Meshuggah's remix of Rammstein's "Benzin."

LePage admitted that many demos on the record were written on "the fifth glass of scotch." Henson's hooks came from what the band calls "the hook zone" — a spot behind LePage's desk where he would pace and hum melodies before moving them to guitar. "J-Bomb," a favorite of the interviewers, channels the triumphant horn-era Young Money beats of Lil Wayne's label. The band's wives, both guitarists said, hate that song.

The band also recorded fully digital, using amp modeling — including 2009's POD Farm plug-in — rather than tube amps. One attempt to re-amp through a real amplifier in the studio, LePage said, "sounds worse."

What is the album actually about?

Henson positioned Be Not Afraid as a refusal of escapism. The band has released two videos, for "Can You Feel It" and "With Eyes to See," that address the leaked files directly. The "Can You Feel It" visualizer includes a clip of Hopper from A Bug's Life warning that the ants must never learn they outnumber the grasshoppers.

"Everybody is trying to say, 'Our music is an escape from all the darkness of the world,'" Henson said. "This is the opposite of that. This is a 'wake the fuck up and look what is happening.'"

On genre, the band declined any label. "It's kind of a better way to put it is like, 'What does it have?' Instead of 'What is it?'" LePage said. Henson's summary: "We're just chasing excitement."

The band's endorsement pedigree is growing — Steve Vai guested on the last album, and Kanye West collaborator Mike Dean had Henson and LePage open for him at a rare live show in 2024. With touring presumably resuming, the question is how these studio-crafted, single-day-born songs translate to the stage.